Windows 7 SP1 x64 and ReadyBoost Flash Drive

DeaconFrost · 13 Oct 2011

In all the discussions and tests on those other boards, paging and caching were interchangeable to cover all data that wasn't running apps. I have have misunderstood, but I thought that's what context was. Several MS developers are members on [H]ardForum, and partitipated in the tests. Those words and comments aren't the point or basis of my stance on this topic. What I was debating was the fact that not all system will benefit from Readyboost, and the line in our testing had always been 1 GB of system memory.

whs · 13 Oct 2011

There is indeed plenty of room for confusion. Reason is because the space allocated on the stick for RB is commonly referred to as "cache" (Btw: the maximum size of that space is 4GB to accomodate Fat32). In addition, it is Superfetch that manages that space - which adds to the confusion. Superfetch intercepts any write operation to disk and also writes that to the stick.

When that same data is to be brought back into RAM, it fetches it from the stick if it is random (because of the faster access time of the stick) and from the disk if it is sequential (because the disk is faster in sequential reads).

In practical terms, only pages that were paged put need to be brought back into RAM. Any other data written to disk usually stays there. It should also be noted that "caching" on the stick and caching in RAM are not exactly the same thing (at least I think so) - although they are both being managed by Superfetch.

There are some details of the mechanism that I do not yet understand. So any additional logic or argument you can contribute is appreciated.

Kage159 · 16 Nov 2011

Corazon said:

Ah, flash drives. The sad thing is - all too often these sticks come preformatted and the default partition on them is woefully misaligned, causing the slow read/write speeds. I have a Corsair Voyager 16GB stick myself and I get about 32MB/sec read and 18MB/sec write out of it.

But I had to totally wipe it with diskpart and then create a new partition aligned at 32KB (starting at sector 64 instead of 63). Then I formatted it in FAT32 with a 32KB cluster size. Vroooom! The speed increase was absolutely massive.

Unfortunately, few people know this and they can't be bothered with all these technical details. But the manufacturers are also at fault for simply setting up their sticks with default partitioning/formatting and leaving them misaligned. Pretty odd, since this would be unacceptable for an SSD drive (and even Windows takes this into account automatically).

Do you have a quick guide on this? I think I can use the SSD aligment guide on here but use the 32k alignment, but I'm not sure about set the sector.

Kage