Readyboost

believe it or not i actually got a performance increase when i ran some scans with readyboost. Things loaded fast for me also. How would it defeat the purpose of having a external HD using readyboost. it only uses 4gb of a drive. And why would someone do it with 6gb of ram. Easiest way to answer that is because I can (or could with vista)

Urbwolf said:

believe it or not i actually got a performance increase when i ran some scans with readyboost...

Please provide analysis results.

I can not provide results hence the believe it or not statement. As i said it worked with vista, I am now using windows 7 and its not working so i cannot supply new results. I was asking if anyone knew why I cant use readyboost not to start a flame why I would want to use readyboost.

I have done more research regarding using a unsupported drive with windows 7. I dont understand why it worked for me in the past without the registry change but it did. I have tried this reg change and it has worked to enable readyboost on my external HD. "registry trick that has existed from the old Vista days. The HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\EMDMgmt, choose proper key*, change device status to 2 trick. (Otherwise known as the Force Readyboost on Unsupported Drives trick)"

I encourage the use of ReadyBoost in many situations. I am particularly interested in your drive configuration and application load during the period of "increased performance".

RB works a bit differently in Win7 than it does in Vista. It is reasonable that applications would load faster even when using the (much) less than optimal hack of HDD based RB that you describe. Other functionality derived from RB is actually hampered using your hack.

If you are going to use the hack moving forward, AND you do not have much I/O on the external drive, you should set the write cache to enabled and disable write-cache buffer flushing through Device Manager. This will allow you to use the drives onboard cache to a limited degree relative to capacity. It is not much, but it does maximize the efficacy of the hack.

You can use any USB memory stick or SD card. I tried this method on Vista and Windows 7 and with memory stick and SD card. I didn't get the readyboost option at first but what I did is the following:
1. right click on the drive you want to use for readyboost from my computer and go to properties
2. check "compress drive to save disk space
3. format that drive as NTFS

after this you should have the option. If not choose for re-test or remove the drive and reconnect.
I never tried with an external HDD but who knows, it might work.