Hey, thinking about getting a readyboost drive to speed up the PC a little, just wondering if it would be possible to install a game on the fast drive and run it from there? Would I see much improvement in loading times?
Readyboost drive + games?
- Thread starter V4NT0M
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Readyboost pre-caches your most used apps onto your flash drive. So it'll speed up the loading of things like iexplorer, word, excell and other exe's that you might use a lot. But if you have enough physical ram, these programs get stored in that anyway, so they are quick to load already and readyboost really isn't used.
Games really wont use readyboost. Readyboost is only good if you have low physical ram, and then its only really useful for loading smaller exe's and DLLs that will actually fit into the cache file of your usb stick.
Its a good idea, and will no doubt be improved and tweaked over the coming years with service packs etc. But its maybe a little late to be released, what with SSD replacing traditional hard disks over the next couple of years.
Games really wont use readyboost. Readyboost is only good if you have low physical ram, and then its only really useful for loading smaller exe's and DLLs that will actually fit into the cache file of your usb stick.
Its a good idea, and will no doubt be improved and tweaked over the coming years with service packs etc. But its maybe a little late to be released, what with SSD replacing traditional hard disks over the next couple of years.
To be honest the most noticeable difference i see with readyboost isn't the speed of loading - that remains about the same, it's more the fact that your HDD has far less time active.
Basically whenever something is written to the page file when using readyboost it is written to both the HDD and the USB stick (to avoid anything going wrong if the USB stick is removed while being accessed), however, when data is then loaded from the page file, the HDD remains idle when it would normally need to be accessed, thus halving the HDDs active time.
This has reduced system noise for me, but more importantly I'm sure it must have increased the lifetime of my HDD.
[EDIT] To make the most of readyboost, buy a fast USB data stick (like the sandisk titanium series - that has read speeds as much as double that of other brands) that ideally matches the capacity of your system ram, eg. i have 4gigs of ram so i need a 4gig usb stick.
Basically whenever something is written to the page file when using readyboost it is written to both the HDD and the USB stick (to avoid anything going wrong if the USB stick is removed while being accessed), however, when data is then loaded from the page file, the HDD remains idle when it would normally need to be accessed, thus halving the HDDs active time.
This has reduced system noise for me, but more importantly I'm sure it must have increased the lifetime of my HDD.
[EDIT] To make the most of readyboost, buy a fast USB data stick (like the sandisk titanium series - that has read speeds as much as double that of other brands) that ideally matches the capacity of your system ram, eg. i have 4gigs of ram so i need a 4gig usb stick.
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Using Readyboost will help Tame down your HDD, Vista likes to thrash it a lot.
The Read speeds are not the important part with the USB Drive and 3MB/Sec Read speed is more than enough.
" Q: What perf do you need on your device?
A: 2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes
Q: My device says 12MB/sec (or 133x or something else) on the package but windows says that it isn't fast enough to use as a ReadyBoost device... why?
A: Two possible reasons:
The numbers measure sequential performance and we measure random. We've seen devices that have great sequential perf, but horrible random
The performance isn't consistantly fast across the entire device. Some devices have 128M of lightning fast flash and the rest of the device is really slow. This is fine for some applications but not ReadyBoost."
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx
The Read speeds are not the important part with the USB Drive and 3MB/Sec Read speed is more than enough.
" Q: What perf do you need on your device?
A: 2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes
Q: My device says 12MB/sec (or 133x or something else) on the package but windows says that it isn't fast enough to use as a ReadyBoost device... why?
A: Two possible reasons:
The numbers measure sequential performance and we measure random. We've seen devices that have great sequential perf, but horrible random
The performance isn't consistantly fast across the entire device. Some devices have 128M of lightning fast flash and the rest of the device is really slow. This is fine for some applications but not ReadyBoost."
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx
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