Whoa....stop putting words in my mouth. No where did I say it shows up as system memory,
Never said you did. But you said the USB is used as paged memory. It is not. This implies the USB is an extension of system memory and therefor should be shown as such. It doesn't and it's not. Never was, never will be used as paged memory.
Readyboost ALWAYS has been about supplementing system memory on older systems that don't have enough built in. It has nothing, repeat, nothing to do with speeding up hard drives. It never has.
It most certainly has and is. You misunderstand the facts or misrepresent the facts. My link is from the Microsoft team that wrote and implemented ReadyBoost. Can't get a better description of the operation than that.
That's is not correct. That's how it's been since the feature was announced with Vista, and that's how it's been today. My link was direct to the product page for Windows 7 on Microsoft.com.
Totally false for Windows 7. Don't care what it was in Vista. That's not the subject of this forum.
Did you actually read the page I linked to you? The 1 GB limit I mentioned...was from the forum testing. Don't believe me? Go post on [H]ardForum and suggest that Readyboost speeds up hard drive access. The 1 GB limit mentioned in the link was abought the minimum size of a flash drive to be considered for Readyboost use.
Yes, I read the page. It's old information from someone that doesn't understand ReadyBoost. Wouldn't be the first time Microsoft didn't stay up-to-date on their pages. My link is straight to the Tech Center.
Now, aside form links, all you have to do is apply a little knowledge and common sense to the subject. System memory has the fastest access speed. So in a perfect world, you would just add more memory. On an older system where that isn't possible, or is costly, Microsoft came up with Readyboost. The first concept PCs to demonstrate it were running 512 MB of memory and Vista. Vista ran like crap on those systems. Microsoft would plug in a Readyboost 1 GB drive, enable the feature, and the system ran better. Why? Because the spillover from system memory could be run off the flash drive and not the hard drive, aka paging, cache, etc. It has nothing to do with increasing performance of the hard drive.
Sorry, I don't believe you. Did you even read my link or the quotes from it above? I'm not the one you should be arguing with. Read the FACTS as you say.
Stepping into the current, the reason it is disabled on an SSD is that the SSD offers faster speeds and access times than a USB flash drive, thanks to the interface. So, if there was to be any spillover on a system with low memory, the next fastest storage medium is the SSD, after the system memory, rendering a Readyboost drive as useless. Again, it has nothing to do with speeding up the hard drive.
Totally false again.
On all of the forum tests, across the enthusiast community, it was determined that once a system has 1 GB of memory, your returns on Readyboost were greatly diminished. Once Windows 7 was released, and the topic was debated again, the same results held true, mainly because Windows 7 ran more efficiently with less memory than Vista....once again, making Readyboost a nearly obsolete feature.
That's how it was, and that's how it's always been. If you still don't want to accept the facts, test it out yourself.
EDIT: I reread the link you gave, and it absolutely confirms my points of what I am trying to get you to understand. When the system has low system memory and a slow hard drive, the spillover cache would normally be going to a slow hard drive by default. Readyboost takes this spillover and offloads it to a faster storage medium, such as a flash drive. We're arguing over semantics, but the point is...the system becomes more responsive. It is not about speeding up the hard drive itself. It's about speeding up the overall system. The article you linked specifically explains this. It even mentions that on a system with a 7200 rpm hard drive, your benefits would be minimal. Why? Because Readyboost isn't designed to speed up the hard drive....it's designed to speed up the spillover cache, which in turn makes the system more responsive.
It says no such thing. The second sentence in the link is very specific about what ReadyBoost does. And I quote (again); "Windows 7 supports Windows ReadyBoost. This feature uses external USB flash drives as a hard disk cache to improve disk read perforance." But at least you're starting to use the correct term--Cache instead of paged memory. It is and always has been Disk Cache. Why do you think ReadyBoost uses the "SuperFetch algorithm"? But instead of links to files as SuperFetch uses, ReadyBoost caches the actual file.
