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#21
ReadyBoost moves some non-critical files, like your swapfile and some prefetch files to the flash drive. The advantage derives from the fact that flash media has a much faster seek time than spinning media; and on the advantage of having two discrete read sources. Putting ReadyBoost material on a harddisk would be mostly pointless - a "6 vs. half a dozen" proposition as far a seek time goes. Interestingly, Windows 7 will support multiple devices - Vista only supported one.
I'd be interested in peoples' benchmarks with/without. Benchmarks I've seen of Vista with/without showed no improvement at all, on a variety of systems... theory being maybe that the technology did work until someone pointed out that someone could walk away with your flash drive and swapfile - containing lots of personal data - so MS frantically implemented encryption, the overhead of which removed virtually all of the speed advantage.