Readyboost

[HoundBoy]

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.

 

[pendrago]

How can I check if in my Windows 7 Ready Boost is activated? I have tried to activate it on my USB Sandisk Micro SDHC 8 GB stick (class 2) and in drive properties I couldn't find any tab named Ready Boost...

 

[devildog93]

When I used Vista... UGH, I had the same issue.

It said that I could allocate some space on my Firelite 160GB ext.HDD for ReadyBoost. I tried, it didn't really work, and I just disabled it. Now, I tried it on a 16GB USB stick, allocating 4GB to it, on my Windows 7 setup and it appears to be working, according to it's own diagnosis that is.


As far as whether it REALLY makes a difference.....I will do some more experimenting. Just once I got it "working" on this setup, I kind of left it and forgot about it, until I saw this thread.

Interesting to see if it does or not.