finally decided to use ready boost, feedback please?

[Perris Calderon]

so I picked up an 8 gig thumb drive and I am guessing "ready boost" puts the pagefile on the thumbdrive.

have you guys seen an improvement with this?

I've read some people think it doesn't do anything

I've minimized some windows and will let them page out for a few ours before I re-launch to see how fast the apps page back into memory but I'd like some feedback from those of you that have been using this

also, there are 32 gig flash and thumbdrives available and I want to know which is faster

also, I picked up a WD 350 gig usb driven portable hardrive for 99 bucks at best buy, they are closing these out if you want a few go and get them pronto

 

[epk]

well.. how much ram have u got on that pc?
with more than 2gb, ready boost isnt gonna make much of a difference

also, the benchmarks i remember showed improvements in memory hungry apps, like photoshop (maybe some newish game would work too)

i dont think the size of the thumb drive will make that big of a difference.. specially when they're that big
but the drive speed probably will, so check that

 

[Perris Calderon]

well.. how much ram have u got on that pc?
with more than 2gb, ready boost isnt gonna make much of a difference

also, the benchmarks i remember showed improvements in memory hungry apps, like photoshop (maybe some newish game would work too)

i dont think the size of the thumb drive will make that big of a difference.. specially when they're that big
but the drive speed probably will, so check that

I think anyone with less then the full four gigs should see a differance, for instance this laptop has 3 gigs and even internet explorer pages out when it's minimized for a few hours, these windows take quite a while before they are paged back in to a useable window, I am assuming that paging process will take less time

windows partioned the thumbdrive form me, it wanted 4 gigs for ready boost, I am left with four gigs for storage

 

[binoyxj]

You can use up to 4GB of flash for ReadyBoost.The FAT32 filesystem limits the ReadyBoost.sfcache file to 4GB.If one removes the thumb drive and if the data is not found in the ReadyBoost cache, it fall back to the HDD.Another point is that only one Thumb drive is supported in a PC.And readyboost don't support external card readers.

 

[epk]

right.. plus, since laptops have slower hdds, the difference should be noticeable

 

[bmclaughlin807]

You're slightly mistaken in the way that ReadyBoost works. It's not just a glorified pagefile... it's a prefetch cache... the biggest improvements I saw when using it were when opening large apps (and during boots!)... and in apps that transferred lots of small bits of data to/from the hard drive.

When using it on my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop w/ 1 gig of ram I used a 2 gig SD card and there was a VERY noticeable improvement in performance. When I upgraded to 2 gigs of ram the difference was a lot less, but it still helped.

Plug it in, reboot a couple of times and run a few apps (or rather... the same apps a few times) and see how much of a difference you notice.

 

[binoyxj]

A copy is made both on the thumb drive and the PC.So if one removes the thumb drive the cache is still in hand.

 

[Gigabot]

I tried ReadyBoost using a 1 GB Sandisk Cruzer Flash Drive on my 1 Gigs RAM computer and the speed was noticeable. Electronic Punk said that if you have over 2 Gigs RAM on your PC then ReadyBoost doesn't really make a difference on the speed (or it's not as noticeable).

I'm not sure what ReadyBoost places on your flash drive but when I checked in my flash drive I saw this large almost 1 Gig cache file named ReadyBoost or something and I had to manually delete it after I was done using ReadyBoost.

 

[binoyxj]

'm not sure what ReadyBoost places on your flash drive but when I checked in my flash drive I saw this large almost 1 Gig cache file named ReadyBoost or something and I had to manually delete it after I was done using ReadyBoost.

Yes its the ReadyBoost.sfcache file.

 

[Perris Calderon]

I tried ReadyBoost using a 1 GB Sandisk Cruzer Flash Drive on my 1 Gigs RAM computer and the speed was noticeable. Electronic Punk said that if you have over 2 Gigs RAM on your PC then ReadyBoost doesn't really make a difference on the speed (or it's not as noticeable).

I'm not sure what ReadyBoost places on your flash drive but when I checked in my flash drive I saw this large almost 1 Gig cache file named ReadyBoost or something and I had to manually delete it after I was done using ReadyBoost.

thanx for all the info guys, I understand ready boost also caches apps and there might not be a big differance when you have tons of ram

however unless you are running a 64 bit os with around 10 gigs the os will page out windows when you minimize the app, ready boost should make a huge differance there even if you have the max memory your 32 bit vista will see

 

[Perris Calderon]

has anyone tried putting their temperary internet file on a thumb drive?

I think that's probably a good idea too, so long as the thumb drive is faster then a hardrive there should be good improvement

 

[binoyxj]

In my opinion its a sort of Gimmick from Microsoft...

 

[epk]

sure.. internet temp files should also make a difference (and the hd will be less worn out)

 

[bmclaughlin807]

My boss was amazed in the difference I made in his laptop performance by simply inserting a $10 sd card and turning on readyboost!

If you have less than 2 gigs of ram then 'just do it'!

The reason the effects drop so noticeably after 2 gigs of ram don't have to do with paging... they have to do with the amount of prefetch that the computer does using RAM... the more RAM you have the more RAM Vista can use for a prefetch... ovbiously RAM is even faster than a USB drive, sd, or something like that.

 

[LordOfLA]

has anyone tried putting their temperary internet file on a thumb drive?

I think that's probably a good idea too, so long as the thumb drive is faster then a hardrive there should be good improvement

If you have broadband you should probably disable that anyway.

 

[binoyxj]

My boss was amazed in the difference I made in his laptop performance by simply inserting a $10 sd card and turning on readyboost!

If you have less than 2 gigs of ram then 'just do it'!

The reason the effects drop so noticeably after 2 gigs of ram don't have to do with paging... they have to do with the amount of prefetch that the computer does using RAM... the more RAM you have the more RAM Vista can use for a prefetch... ovbiously RAM is even faster than a USB drive, sd, or something like that.

SD cards are not supported by Readyboost.

 

[epk]

mm.. actually, they are

 

[binoyxj]

Why i said so was because SD cards are used in external card reader right.So if card is not inserted in the reader,it posses an error it seems.. So i thing they have not officially supporting SD cards..

 

[epk]

they dont support external readers, but they work with internal ones (at least with most)

 

[binoyxj]

Yea from beta2 they have added support for a small number of SD/CF cards on internal USB2 & PCIe buses.