Readyboost any good?

eddyc

eddyc

eddyc

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I am building a super budget PC for video editing. Almost all of the parts will be bits and pieces I just had lying around.

I have 2Gb of DDR2 RAM which will be going in. Obviously it would be good to add another 2 but that would increase the cost of the build too much. I might do it later.

Would it be worth buying a cheap 2GB memory stick to use for readyboost? What brand should I go for? I have seen that some of the scandisk cruzer micro sticks have readyboost in the name. Presumably they are claiming to be better than the competition but I can't see anything in the description to explain how/why they would be.

Any help would be great.

EDIT: also I do have a 512mb stick of DDR2 which I could put in but will the mismatched RAM upset overclocking? Would it be worth it?
 
you cannot afford £23? if you have a 2gb USB memory stick laying about its worth a shot, however by the time you buy and ship a memory stick thats going to be the best part of half way to a 2 gb RAM upgrade... not worth it... also the really cheap memory sticks or old ones are likley to be so slow you loose most of any possible benefit anyway.... (the reviews I read a while back suggested there was little benefit to readyboost anyway)
 
Well the original idea was to keep it as close to free as possible. :D

I have already spent £42 so an extra 20 or so would actually start to push the budget for this one!

I guess I will just see what happens if I add a memory stick that I have lying around and then I can prioritise getting another 2GB later on.

Any ideas about the extra 512mb though? Will that screw up my overclocking potential? I have never overclocked a machine that did not have matching memory before.
 
Readyboost is used a HDD cache not extra memory, it depends more on your HDD than anything. Windows will tell you if it is going to boost performance and don't use it if it will not help.

The extra 512mb is hard to say, your best bet is to bench with and without it. I'd say it is likely to slow rather than speed the system but I can't be 100% sure.
 
At work I have a Q6600 quad with 3.5GB, however it's hard-drive only has a 5.0 score. I added a 4GB USB stick and it's definitely improved performance. I measured build time (Visual Studio), on a large project, and build time was taken from 1:55 seconds to 45seconds. While it's building the USB stick light is active a lot.

At home I have a 8GB i5, however my boot disk is a Weston Digital 500GB RE (Overclockers were selling these for £20!). It only gives me 5.6 in windows performance, so I added 2 x Patriot 25MB+/second USB sticks spanned (Win 7 spans ready disks). Again I have gained a noticeable boost in performance.

You may say why bother with the slower Weston Digital drive, well there an old enterprise drive and there bomb proof. I also had a bad experience with SSD drives, and if a USB stick fails it can be replaced without loosing data.
 
sorry dont mean to hijack, would adding something like a USB 3.0 External HDD work with readyboost to increase performance? where do you notice the gains, in everyday use or just RAM instense programs?
 
paradisiac said:
sorry dont mean to hijack, would adding something like a USB 3.0 External HDD work with readyboost to increase performance? where do you notice the gains, in everyday use or just RAM instense programs?
Click to expand...

I don't see any reason why the readyboost won't work on external HDD's.

Readyboost caches common accessed files onto the USB sticks, it's the same principle as the Seagate hybrid drives. Ready disk performance is not related to computer RAM, it's simply a way to speed up HDD access.
 
paradisiac said:
so as my system is RAID0 for OS and Apps i wouldnt really gain a huge amount?
Click to expand...

It may move some of the smaller files over. Your RAID 0 may have incredible sequential performance, however access times for small files may still be faster on a USB stick.

Your best bet is just to try, as mentioned in this thread Windows only uses a USB as readyboost if there's a performance gain. When you insert the stick it does a speed test.

One of my sticks is a 16GB patriot, and in speed tests (on my machine) it shows up to 31mb/second. It helps if you get fast sticks.
 
Correction. It caches commonly accessed small files i.e. ones a hd takes time to locate while superfetch caches commonly used large files in ram.

Max readyboost capacity is 4gb (well 8, it's compressed at 2:1) as its FAT32. Most new drives will meet the spec (patriot xporters good) and readyboost will make a difference if you don't have a ssd, but only if you're running with the memory full i.e. at the machines limits. Otherwise the difference is so small it's almost unnoticeable.

Tbh, for an editing pc 4gb ram is really the minimum. Considering a good flash drive is half the cost of the ram the ram makes more sense. However, if cost really is so tight then grab http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FL-007-PA&groupid=701&catid=1913&subcat=1309

For what it's worth, I have one of those cheap cruzer sticks using readyboost (it was laying around doing nothing) but the difference is only a second of two here and there and it's only just fast enough, while patriots are noticeably faster (like 3/4 times). Most usb drives are built for large files, not 512/4k random read/writes.
 
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"ReadyBoost-capable flash memory: NAND memory devices" so no a external HDD will not work with ReadyBoost.

I've never believed that ReadyBoost is a replacement for RAM, but I don't blame you for thinking that since the people in purple shirts seem to refer to it in that way.

Like Azuse05 said, ReadyBoost was actually designed to remove the bottleneck caused by mechanical hard drives when accessing lots of small files randomly, to load a program faster for example. Didn't know it used FAT32 and therefore had a limit of 4GB, thats useful to know.
 
Readyboost can also be installed on Fat64 and NTFS. Windows 7 adds spanning of USB sticks (Vista only allowed one stick), you can have a total of 256GB of readyboost space.

I agree it only caches commonly accessed small files.

It has made a huge difference to my Visual Studio built time at work. But the machines HDD is very slow.

Overall however if your HDD is fast you maybe won't notice much.
 
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True, I forgot about multiple flash drives.

Well you can use a larger drive, but only 4 gb will be given to it and any additional transfers would negatively impact it so there's really not point in using anything larger. The real problem is most drives fail to meet the spec of 2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes hence small drive with decent controller (i.e. patriot) is really required for any significant gain. The op would be working at memory capacity so he would see a reasonable difference on that pc.

Useful reading: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...xplained/ea4e8f1d-04fa-4338-ab08-aad77eab8088
 
RE 4GB limit, the computer i'm using has a 16GB readyboost drive installed. The actual cache file is showing as 15,625,216KB.

The link you posted pre-dates Windows 7, and readyboost was improved for Win 7.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

Also in the future Microsoft are planning on using readyboost on the spare memory of other PC's on a network. So for example your at work, but other PC's are switched on but not used. If you have a fast network the memory of other PC's will be used as HDD/SSD cache.
 
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How about eSATA thumb drives? Would they be faster again?

Anyone know if multiple flash drives offers better performance than a single one? Or is it just about the total capacity?
 
eSATA thumbs won't be any faster unless the underlying storage technology is better, which will be exactly the same as the latest USB thumbs.

For the price of those 16GB patriot thumbs, I'd get a cheap 30GB SSD for £50 and either:
1:- install the OS to it (if you can fit in the space), or
2:- move temp space, pagefile etc.. to it.
 
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