This sounds like a fairy tale. I fail to see the advantage of ready boost - especially with your amount of RAM. And caching the HDD may give a little advantage, but it does not make the HDD spin any faster and the access time is still slow. If you enable caching, you have the same effect as with your complicated setup.
Readyboost really works well so long as you use one of our much faster USB 3 memory sticks from now, five years in to your future. Memory sticks outpace mechanical hard drives today and there's no head seek time to accumulate whilst reading in countless tiny files which bog mechanical drives down, such as when booting up the operating system. Readyboost is all about being a disk cache, some mistake it for a memory cache, it has nothing to do with how much RAM you've got. However today's solid state hard drives greatly outpace today's fast memory sticks, thus rendering Readyboost pointless for anyone other than those who only have mechanical drives but have a USB 3 interface
Last edited by MickeyT2008; 22 Apr 2017 at 19:48. Reason: This seemed more succinct
I'm running on 16gb/ram, and no swap file. More ram.... More speed.
Ready Boost is absolutely useless in a system with more than 2 or 3gb/ram.
Readyboost is a disk cache. It obviously helps in low memory situations where the page file will be hitting the disk all the time. However it's main purpose as a disk cache is useful with any amount of system memory if you're using slow hard drives, slower than the cache provided by the USB memory stick. The reason it's always been considered pointless is that USB 2 interfaces and the memory sticks available when Readyboost was introduced were very slow. I've tried it with a fast USB 3 mem stick on my friend's PC that has no SSD. It made the whole operating system run much more smoothly and stutter far less. You don't notice the difference when you plug it in because it's got to fill, it's if you take it away again then you see just how poorly it performs without it. Of course if you've got SSD's then it's not needed but in that situation Windows 10 (and possibly the others) won't allow you to set it up anyway, stating that there's nothing to gain.
The Readyboost cache and SSD drives share the same advantage over mechanical hard drives, there's no head seek time so none to accumulate when loading in thousands of tiny files as it hunts all over the drive for them.
As for answering old posts, the question of how useful Readyboost is is something that still comes up. I found this thread whilst reading about it and other people will too. And it's no longer a dead conversation thread either
Last edited by MickeyT2008; 23 Apr 2017 at 05:55.
Readyboost in today's computers is as useless as nipples on a barn door.
It was intended for slow drives with very little ram in the system.
pparks1 in post #2 said it best.
Just my thoughts.A 5GB/s ready boost drive is called RAM and it already exists.
Jack
My own PC has an SSD and 32GB of RAM so I have no need of it either, but there are situations when it does make the computer run better. To benefit the memory stick has to be faster than the hard drive and its USB interface has to be fast enough, so basically it has to be USB 3. Hard drives tend to top out at about 140Mbps and get bogged down when serving up lots of small files, even a memory stick that can't exceed that 140Mbps will still win when it comes to serving up those small files first.
And of course memory sticks aren't very expensive and have other uses so if it doesn't improve a specific machine then nothing much was lost by trying.
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