Readyboost

iviv · 14 May 2008 at 18:56

My last thread on the subject, honest!

I've got 4Gb of ram, and have just been pointed to a couple of very nice, and pretty cheap flash drives that have some good stats on them. They are both 8Gb on that site in Jersey. One is own brand, £16 and boasts:
# Read Speed: 10.5MB/S (70X)
# Write speed: 7.24MB/s (48X)

The other is a couple of quid more, is a PNY Attache Optima drive, and has Writing & reading speed: 10MB/s & 25MB/s.

I'm considering getting this second drive to use as a readyboost as its nice and cheap, and much higher than the minimums needed for readyboost. But would there be much of a performance increase to be seen? Also, according to wikipedia it can only use 4Gb for readyboost. Is this just because of the 32bit limitation, and would that not be a problem on a 64 bit OS? Or would there just be no point, as the 4Gb is good enough without needing readyboost?

Thankee

Bomag · 14 May 2008 at 20:10

Tomshardware did a test and for any PC with 2GB and over it made it slightly slower.

Effective ram transfers are about 5gb/s

Dinkas · 15 May 2008 at 00:49

Readyboost is probably limited to 4GB and under due to it having to be FAT32, which has a 4GB max file size. Makes no difference whether the OS is 32bit or 64bit.

I've not seen any tests on fast desktop machines with 4GB+ ram (and probably a RAID array) showing ReadyBoost to be worthwhile or otherwise. Anyone know?

I would think placing the pagefile on a separate physical drive is still the fastest.

iviv · 15 May 2008 at 01:54

I would think placing the pagefile on a separate physical drive is still the fastest.

Ooh, thats a good idea, as I've got 3 seperate hard drives with various OSes installed. Would it have to be saved in the root, and would it conflict with other Windows pagefiles?
Also, I find it strange that readyboost has to be FAT32, as wouldn't it be more like MS to use their own filesystem for it?

LeperousDust · 15 May 2008 at 10:51

It depends how often you cold boot your PC, the only way readyboost helps in this instance is it stores your vista super fetch data, so vista does have to start rebuilding and caching things on startup, it just loads from the readyboost and then jigs a little. Tbh though unless you're constantly turning your PC on and off, and its slow as (but i can't see that if you've put 4GB of memory in it?) then it isn't worth wasting a 4GB USB drive on it, better to use it to store files on the move, can never have enough portable space!

Dolph · 15 May 2008 at 11:16

Bomag said:
Tomshardware did a test and for any PC with 2GB and over it made it slightly slower.

Effective ram transfers are about 5gb/s

I'm yet to see anyone actually manage to test what readyboost does. A hint is that in game FPS tests etc will show nothing...

LeperousDust said:
It depends how often you cold boot your PC, the only way readyboost helps in this instance is it stores your vista super fetch data, so vista does have to start rebuilding and caching things on startup, it just loads from the readyboost and then jigs a little. Tbh though unless you're constantly turning your PC on and off, and its slow as (but i can't see that if you've put 4GB of memory in it?) then it isn't worth wasting a 4GB USB drive on it, better to use it to store files on the move, can never have enough portable space!

It takes a long time to build up the superfetch cache, several hours on every switch on. Readyboost means it's always there. For the cost of a compatible memory stick, it's well worth it to have the instant benefits of superfetch when I switch my PC on in the morning or when I come home from work.

LeperousDust · 15 May 2008 at 11:46

But superfetch is a variable thing, depending on time of day etc... so switching your PC off at night and then back on in the morning means it still has to build some of its cache, its not instant just technically a little quicker.

Anyway i don't think its worth it really, i've tried it and i know what i'm looking for, but i've noticed very little difference plus i proimently use a laptop so i'd rather not have the USB thing sticking out the side, although i have looked into integrating an old 4GB SD card with one of the (possible) spare USB header on the motherboard. If i could do this (easily), i might stick with readyboost otherwise it seems an inelegant solution.