Windows 7: Windows 7 SP1 x64 and ReadyBoost Flash Drive

*Posted the same question on Neowin as I am looking for a wide variety of opinions, you will see why*

HI,

I know I will get flamed about using ReadyBoost at all but let me just fishing saying, in the system I just built for my wife it make a WORLD of difference. Call it the Placebo effect whatever but I notice a huge difference in boot time and responsiveness.

Right now I am using this little rinky-dink $9.00 PNY slider drive that my wife bought because she thought it was pretty, well little ole' me has now gone through 4 of the "fastest" flash drives on the market, the Sandisk Cruiser, the OCZ Rally 2, the Corsair Voyager and another larger PNY. None of them rate more than half the speed of this little slider flash drive. I consistently get 30W and 20R on all programs I try to test it with. Other Tests show much higher result too but let's just stick with the R/W for now.

BTW, I also tried the Patriot XT Xtreme series but according to the manufacturer's it is not compatible with either Acronis products or Adobe, after hours and hours with tech support and 3 different drive we figured this out. The programs only work right if the drive is unplugged. Patriot is even going to their developers to see why this is.

SO are there any other drives to try or should I just stick with this one till it dies. I do plan to research the s**t out of this if the retailers don't stop me for returning stuff.... hehe



Any opinions?

Thanks!

dev

How much system memory does she have? If it's over 1 GB, then it's been well-proven that you would be seeing the placebo effect and nothing more. Readyboost was designed for systems with less than required system memory, as a way of offering extra memory that was faster than a pagefile.

As for your program discussions, I'm quite confused. What Acronis/Adobe product are you dealing with that has anything to do with a flash drive?

System has 2 G of memory and the programs are Acronis True Image Home 2012 and Adobe Photoshop CS5 x64

dev

2 GB shouldn't need Readyboost, and shouldn't show any differences with it enabled. Are you saying Photoshop doesn't run if the flash drive is plugged in? There's also no real reason to run x64 with 2 GB of memory. Either upgrade her to 4 GB, or install x86. Windows 7 x64 has a little more memory overhead, so you are actually using a little more of your system memory than you need to.

Well, what we have is what we have. I am disabled and on a fixed income. Can't afford to go get 2 more sticks of memory or Another copy of Windows just for this machine. It was just a resurrected older system I rebuilt for my wife. Believe it or not, she and I, see a great improvement with the Flash Drive installed. Call it the Placebo effect if you want but there is definitely more responsiveness once the system is up and hot.

As for Photoshop etc... It works the same with either the 64 or 32 bit version. I have been through the ringer about those Patriot drives with tech support. They are even doing engineering research themselves since they were actually able to recreate the problem. Acronis agrees that there are just some flash drives it is not compatible with they claim it's a know issue and in one of their disclaimers. Adobe just said try another flash drive.

dev

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).

You don't need to buy a new copy of Windows to switch to x86. You already have a valid license. You just need the install media. That can be found on a legit Microsoft-owned website with some quick searching.

You do not need to change to x86. Windows 7 x64 does not have more overhead it just cashes more memory at boot. You will not see any proformace diffrence in x86 Windows 7.

OK so I still have the OCZ Rally2 in my possession. Can you give me exact instructions on what to do to increase the speed as you mentioned? Right now, at both normal FAT32 and NTFS format it will only do 16R - 8.5W no matter what I did. OCZ also says they have no low level format utility for this drive.

Can you help me out with this one?

Not true at all. Windows 7 x64 does have a higher memory footprint, with or without "caching" taken into consideration. It isn't about performance, either. I never said Photoshop would run faster. I said there would be more system memory available to it. Big difference.