Windows ReadyBoost does it actually work?

Yeah I haven't noticed much difference with 2gb or 4gb installed trying to use readyboost. I wonder if a 512mb system with a 16gb USB drive would be like a 1gb system speed wise?

In launching apps, maybe, but no good for multi-tasking....

Like SuperFetch. I think ReadyBoost needs some time to settle and if you're just testing clean builds every other week or all you're doing is loading games and streaming large video files and stuff you probably won't see any difference other than a bit faster startup and app load times but on certain kinds of heavy use multimedia, programming type workstations I think it might even have it's place even if you have a boatload of ram and a fast HDD.. that is at least until OCZ drops the Colossus SSDs in a few weeks (and I cry when I see the initial prices.. )

I don't think of readyboost as extra, slow ram, but more like a little ghetto SSD drive for small files that are accessed often, and frees up the hdd to work on the big stuff instead of scrambling around for all these little files that take it relatively long to access. I'm pretty amazed at how fast GIMP x64 loads on my machine now for example. The thumb drives may not be able to compete with a hard drive for data rate but the access time is much lower (my cruzer 8gb says 0.5ms in HDTune, while my Seagate 1tb hdd is 12.6ms) I don't really claim to understand how it works at all but it seems to work for me, just my 2c.

Interestingly my Windows Vista with 4GB used my Readyboost but Windows 7 RC Ultimate told me it would not help because my resources were fine.

Strange, my 7 with 4gb installed let me use ReadyBoost on two 8gb flash drives at the same time. I ended up removing the slower one because I don't have any other flash drives and I've heard ReadyBoost wears them out pretty quick... and it just seemed like it would be overkill and probably wouldn't be worth it since the other drive had a lot lower access time and higher data rates. From what I've heard 2.5x your physical ram is about as much useful readyboost space as you can get.

Thanks ECO, after reading your explanation about using 8GB flash drives, I looked at mine and it was only a 2GB flash drive. That is probably why 7 said it wouldn't make an improvement.

ok before I went sleep earlier I connected up my new 2 gig usb card to my laptop which has 1 gig of ram. I had to enable superfetch.

before plugging it in, the commit was about 1.3 gig and over 950meg ram used. It then proceeded to thrash my hdd for ages, I am guessing moving stuff from pagefile to readyboost. My ram usage is now down to about 600meg ram. So it looks like both of pagefile and some of what was in ram has been moved over to readyboost. Overall the laptop is defenitly more responsive.

Win7 is fast but I was suffering from excessive pagefile usage. To me readyboost seems a logical choice if you out of ram using something like a laptop.

I've got 4Gb ram(only 3.2Gb seen by 64bit Windows 7).

Something is not right there. The 64 bit OS should see all of it. A 32 bit OS will show what you stated. If you have an older motherboard, sometimes there will be a setting in the BIOS to enable it to see all of it. I forget now what that BIOS setting is called (I used to have a motheboard that had that setting).

Just to clarify here. Is a 1GB Windows Vista or 1GB Win 7 considered a low resource system? From what I understood about Readyboost, you are supposed to put a Flash that is double your system memory right? If I use a 2 GB flash drive with a 1GB system, should I see an improvement?

exo said:

Strange, my 7 with 4gb installed let me use ReadyBoost on two 8gb flash drives at the same time. I ended up removing the slower one because I don't have any other flash drives and I've heard ReadyBoost wears them out pretty quick... and it just seemed like it would be overkill and probably wouldn't be worth it since the other drive had a lot lower access time and higher data rates. From what I've heard 2.5x your physical ram is about as much useful readyboost space as you can get.

Per Microsoft, a flash drive dedicated to ReadyBoost should last 10 years. Take it for what it's worth because I'm sure they won't refund the price of a worn out drive. But supposedly they improved ReadyBoost for Windows 7. It will now take 8 devices up to 256GB. I still haven't heard what possible use there is for that much ability.