Windows 7: Readyboost

Charbroil57 said:

Maybe it is I, who is misinformed...I reformatted my 8GB Cruzer thumb drive to NTFS and dedicated all free memory (7.47GB) to ReadyBoost. Of the three file systems (FAT, FAT32, and NTFS), I thought NTFS would be the more efficient since it is the native file system.

you are right although there have been made improvements....
but generally you want NTFS when you need reliability, secuirity and you see general performance if you are handling larger files (>4gb which fat cannot handle anyways)

if you are handling small files then it will cause overhead
the reason why Fat is faster?
because its simpler
if you really want to get the Max Performance and you are not handling files larger than 4gb then Fat32 is the best choice...
if its less than 256mb then regular old Fat (fat16) is better in terms of performance as you wont handling large files (such as iso's and videos to name a few) but small files (documents, notes, small pictures) which is where fat does perform well....

Adamd said:

maybe they figure it really does not make much difference?

I have been testing it with and without and so far have not really noticed any increase in speed.

maybe for those systems that have 512mb of ram might see something...

Using a 1GB external flash drive, I noticed it when playing Age of Conan with 2GB of RAM. Then I maxed out my notebook to 4GB of RAM and stopped noticing any difference with the flash drive. The extra RAM boost is by FAR more worth it.

darkassain said:

it depends on how much memory you have...
if you have enough then you should by all means disable the page file...
this will not only force the system to put all of its files on memory(and make it faster to access windows) but also free up a bunch of space...
like i said at this point if you have enough ram and you are using readyboost (if you disabled the page file of course) the bottleneck will now be at the usb interface and will slow you down....

Disabling page file altogether is a terrible idea. Doesn't matter how much RAM you have, some applications specifically look for the page file, and if it isn't there, they will either not run or run and crash. Hell, if your machine for some random reason suddenly looks for the page file it could also BSOD. Besides, this USED to be an issue with say XP, but Vista/Windows 7 are much smarter with memory management. Leave it alone is the best bet.

Now moving your page file to a different/faster drive could be a good idea.

I Have installed windows 7 on my dell 2.0 Ghz 2 GB ram laptop and it works very well.Used my nearly new patriot XT boost 200 X 16 GB flash drive for ready boost and wow.This is what computers should be like.Really really fast.IE opens on google home page instantly (unlike vista)I used a full allocation of the drive for performance.After 24 hrs the drive died.It is recognised but not accessable after I rebooted. It is the same in Vista also .Dead dead dead. It had been working for the last month on vista (4GB limit) without problems.It came with a lifetime warranty but is only certified for 4GB like all other drives onthe market.Be very carefull with expensive high speed drives ,as if you use all available memory for cache ,32 GB or even bigger these drives are not meant for this kind of use and could end up like mine.

Charbroil57 said:

After research and testing, I have drawn the conclusion that with 8 GB of RAM installed, ReadyBoost was not that beneficial. I am using my 7.67 GB Cruzer for file storage off the hard drive.

I don't know what the current recommendation from MS is, but it used to be that to have a significant benefit from Readyboost, you use a flash device that is double the amount of your system RAM. MS called that the optimal arrangement. Could be different now.

Hmm, What exactly does Readyboost do?

I don't know what the current recommendation from MS is, but it used to be that to have a significant benefit from Readyboost, you use a flash device that is double the amount of your system RAM. MS called that the optimal arrangement. Could be different now.

M$ says it's good to have a 1:1 ratio in conjunction with your ram. And shouldn't exceed a 2.5 : 1 ratio, otherwise it will just crap out.
and is really only useful for pc's with less than 2 gigs of ram.

lets say you have 2 GB of ram, so 2 GB of ready boost is recommended, it can be more, ~4 gigs i suppose.

just think, a week ago i didn't even know what ready boost was

holo88 said:

M$ says it's good to have a 1:1 ratio in conjunction with your ram. And shouldn't exceed a 2.5 : 1 ratio, otherwise it will just crap out.
and is really only useful for pc's with less than 2 gigs of ram.

lets say you have 2 GB of ram, so 2 GB of ready boost is recommended, it can be more, ~4 gigs i suppose.

just think, a week ago i didn't even know what ready boost was

Wiki said:

Microsoft recommends the amount of flash memory for ReadyBoost acceleration be one to three times the amount of random access memory (RAM) in your computer.

I remember having an XP machine with 512MB RAM and using a 1.0GB flash device.

Win7User512 said:

I remember having an XP machine with 512MB RAM and using a 1.0GB flash device.

XP had readyboost?!? or was it some sort of mod type thing?