Vista and Readyboost

It is not hype. I have read that using the thumb drive for the Ready Boost feature has provided a nice increase in application loading. It is a pretty trick feature. You should a performce boost. 1 gig of RAM should work, but at least 2 gigs is better for Vista.

It is a nice life saving feature for when you need emeregency RAM but it is not a recommended replacement for regular RAM for two reasons:

A- It is not as fast as regular internal RAM.
B- Current flash drives have a limited number of writes (life) before the memory wears out.

For best performance it is better to get as much real RAM as you can.

I wish memory was more affordable..

Yea, ReadyBoost doesn't "add" RAM...its more of a disk cache:

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

My understanding was , it is just virtual memory that runs a little faster being flash based instead of running on a hard drive, not worth it in IMHO

It is definately worth it...It does make a difference to application load times etc...

How does it affect game performance?

Pwnd! , I didn't see a noticeable difference with a 512 flash drive and a 2 gb SD card . maybe it has something to do with the amount of RAM you have... or maybe my flash drive is just slow ;D

I was thinking about buying this to basically use exclusively with ReadyBoost

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820220156

Here's a great interview on the subject:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/arch...02/615199.aspx

I don't have vista yet but I will hopefully get it soon when 64bit prices drop but I have a 1gb Sony Flash Card, would I be able to use that? I have 2gb of ram usually

Very badly:



Readyboost speed is nowhere near the speed of internal RAM so don't expect to use it as replacement RAM for gaming.

Here's an interesting article.

I was using it as supplemental RAM. I already have 2 gigs (with the option to buy 2 more gigs) I was mainly looking at it for a cheap $50 upgrade Currently, I'm using my 1gig USB stick in it, but that can't last forever because it's my only jump drive lol However, it looks like it's not worth it, according to Tom's Hardware:

That statement from the THG article is misleading. It is true that the Vista memory tech's don't speed up your system, so they won't help much for programs that don't swap a lot of data, but do need a lot of CPU work. The level of performance improvements depend on what kind of disk access the programs you use do.

The Vista tech's are a way of caching disk data in faster RAM for read purposes. Using a USB flash drive could theoretically give data load times about a 5x performance boost over hard drive load times. The degree of improvement also depends on flash drive access and transfer speeds for the types of transfers that the Vista tech's do. Currently flash drive performance for the Vista tech's varies greatly since there are no industry standards for these parameters. So application loads and programs that perform many small random reads from disk could see significant performance increases.

However, if you have a large amount of main system RAM, Superfetch will use the unused system RAM as cache instead of the slower flash drive RAM. Therefore you should see much faster performance in Vista than you would with the same applications under XP, only you wouldn't see much improvement by adding a flash drive where the additional cache space wouldn't be needed.

hey guys, we've got a similar thread going here:

http://www.notebookforums.com/thread190160.html

Basically, here's a couple sites to look up thumb and flash cards of which I've decided to try an SD flash card by SanDisk that's rated on some readers at 19 Mb/s read and 18 Mb/s write speeds with an avg latency access time of 0.9 ms...

Here's a really great site for tracking down access and transfer speed differences among a lot of flash cards in various formats and in various readers:

http://www.hjreggel.net/cardspeed/

The focus of the above site is for digital camera usage, so it's worth a look-see for that reason as well.

Here's a RB (ReadyBoost) compatibility listing site for over 400 flash cards and thumb drives:

http://www.grantgibson.co.uk/misc/readyboost/

Based on these sites, I've selected the ReadyBoost compatible 2 Gb SanDisk SD Extreme III card as a $50 low cost addition to my Dell E1705 order in hopes that its internal 5-in-1 card reader performs decently with this hi-speed card. Some flash readers have compatibility issues with certain cards, so I'll know next week when my laptop arrives whether this combo works or not. If not... well, I've got myself a huge number of photos to take with my camera, lol! Enjoy...