high I/O with Puppy on USB drive

[LANdpLAN]

I thought that puppy is supposed to be loaded into ram. Why is it reading from the USB drive that booted from? When I created a puppy usb drive with fat32 partition there was a save button on the desktop. I needed more than 4gb for one of my save files so I created a usb with e4StickPup and there is no save button. I think it is automatically saving, causing high I/O. What do you think about creating a e4StickPup with a save button so that I can make the computer save when it is convenient for me.

[bigpup]

I assume sdb is the USB drive with sdb1 and sdb2 partitions.

Click on the sdb1 drive icon on the desktop.

This will show it's contents in Rox file manager.

Left click on the file grub.cfg

This will show it's entries in a text editor.

Find in the entry pmedia=usbhd

change it to pmedia=usbflash

Save the change.

Close the editor.

Reboot.

Should now have the save icon on the desktop.

Settings for how the save works should now be adjustable in Event Manager ->Save session tab.

note:
Because it was pmedia=usbhd,
Puppy was running in pupmode 12.
This makes the save active at all time, to directly write to it, when something changes.
pmedia=usbflash will make it run in pupmode 13.
This mode will allow setting options for when writes are made to the save.
It will make a save ramdisk in memory, to store the changes, until you have them written to the save file/folder.
Pupmode 13 does use more memory to operate.

The core parts of Puppy, all the Puppy sfs packages(files and programs), and specific operating files, all load into memory.

The save file/folder never loads into memory.
It loads(layers) into the operating file system. To the operating file system, everything in the save, is also in it.
If something is in the save and is needed.
It is read from the save and then loaded into operating memory.
The save is a file or a folder stored on a drive partition. It is stored data that is written to and read from.
The actual save, is a storage location, used to store what has been changed or added, to Puppy.

Think about this.
I have a save folder that is 11GB in size.
No way would I want all 11GB, loaded into memory, and using up 11GB of operating memory.
If something is needed, stored in this save, only that is read and loaded into memory.