Windows 7 SP1 x64 and ReadyBoost Flash Drive

[devnulllore]

*Posted the same question on Neowin as I am looking for a wide variety of opinions, you will see why*

HI,

I know I will get flamed about using ReadyBoost at all but let me just fishing saying, in the system I just built for my wife it make a WORLD of difference. Call it the Placebo effect whatever but I notice a huge difference in boot time and responsiveness.

Right now I am using this little rinky-dink $9.00 PNY slider drive that my wife bought because she thought it was pretty, well little ole' me has now gone through 4 of the "fastest" flash drives on the market, the Sandisk Cruiser, the OCZ Rally 2, the Corsair Voyager and another larger PNY. None of them rate more than half the speed of this little slider flash drive. I consistently get 30W and 20R on all programs I try to test it with. Other Tests show much higher result too but let's just stick with the R/W for now.

BTW, I also tried the Patriot XT Xtreme series but according to the manufacturer's it is not compatible with either Acronis products or Adobe, after hours and hours with tech support and 3 different drive we figured this out. The programs only work right if the drive is unplugged. Patriot is even going to their developers to see why this is.

SO are there any other drives to try or should I just stick with this one till it dies. I do plan to research the s**t out of this if the retailers don't stop me for returning stuff.... hehe

Any opinions?

Thanks!

dev

 

[DeaconFrost]

How much system memory does she have? If it's over 1 GB, then it's been well-proven that you would be seeing the placebo effect and nothing more. Readyboost was designed for systems with less than required system memory, as a way of offering extra memory that was faster than a pagefile.

As for your program discussions, I'm quite confused. What Acronis/Adobe product are you dealing with that has anything to do with a flash drive?

 

[devnulllore]

System has 2 G of memory and the programs are Acronis True Image Home 2012 and Adobe Photoshop CS5 x64

dev

 

[DeaconFrost]

2 GB shouldn't need Readyboost, and shouldn't show any differences with it enabled. Are you saying Photoshop doesn't run if the flash drive is plugged in? There's also no real reason to run x64 with 2 GB of memory. Either upgrade her to 4 GB, or install x86. Windows 7 x64 has a little more memory overhead, so you are actually using a little more of your system memory than you need to.

 

[devnulllore]

Well, what we have is what we have. I am disabled and on a fixed income. Can't afford to go get 2 more sticks of memory or Another copy of Windows just for this machine. It was just a resurrected older system I rebuilt for my wife. Believe it or not, she and I, see a great improvement with the Flash Drive installed. Call it the Placebo effect if you want but there is definitely more responsiveness once the system is up and hot.

As for Photoshop etc... It works the same with either the 64 or 32 bit version. I have been through the ringer about those Patriot drives with tech support. They are even doing engineering research themselves since they were actually able to recreate the problem. Acronis agrees that there are just some flash drives it is not compatible with they claim it's a know issue and in one of their disclaimers. Adobe just said try another flash drive.:sarc:

dev

 

[Corazon]

Ah, flash drives. The sad thing is - all too often these sticks come preformatted and the default partition on them is woefully misaligned, causing the slow read/write speeds. I have a Corsair Voyager 16GB stick myself and I get about 32MB/sec read and 18MB/sec write out of it.

But I had to totally wipe it with diskpart and then create a new partition aligned at 32KB (starting at sector 64 instead of 63). Then I formatted it in FAT32 with a 32KB cluster size. Vroooom! The speed increase was absolutely massive.

Unfortunately, few people know this and they can't be bothered with all these technical details. But the manufacturers are also at fault for simply setting up their sticks with default partitioning/formatting and leaving them misaligned. Pretty odd, since this would be unacceptable for an SSD drive (and even Windows takes this into account automatically).

 

[DeaconFrost]

You don't need to buy a new copy of Windows to switch to x86. You already have a valid license. You just need the install media. That can be found on a legit Microsoft-owned website with some quick searching.

 

[Beta]

You do not need to change to x86. Windows 7 x64 does not have more overhead it just cashes more memory at boot. You will not see any proformace diffrence in x86 Windows 7.

 

[devnulllore]

Ah, flash drives. The sad thing is - all too often these sticks come preformatted and the default partition on them is woefully misaligned, causing the slow read/write speeds. I have a Corsair Voyager 16GB stick myself and I get about 32MB/sec read and 18MB/sec write out of it.

But I had to totally wipe it with diskpart and then create a new partition aligned at 32KB (starting at sector 64 instead of 63). Then I formatted it in FAT32 with a 32KB cluster size. Vroooom! The speed increase was absolutely massive.

Unfortunately, few people know this and they can't be bothered with all these technical details. But the manufacturers are also at fault for simply setting up their sticks with default partitioning/formatting and leaving them misaligned. Pretty odd, since this would be unacceptable for an SSD drive (and even Windows takes this into account automatically).

OK so I still have the OCZ Rally2 in my possession. Can you give me exact instructions on what to do to increase the speed as you mentioned? Right now, at both normal FAT32 and NTFS format it will only do 16R - 8.5W no matter what I did. OCZ also says they have no low level format utility for this drive.

Can you help me out with this one?

 

[DeaconFrost]

You do not need to change to x86. Windows 7 x64 does not have more overhead it just cashes more memory at boot. You will not see any proformace diffrence in x86 Windows 7.

Not true at all. Windows 7 x64 does have a higher memory footprint, with or without "caching" taken into consideration. It isn't about performance, either. I never said Photoshop would run faster. I said there would be more system memory available to it. Big difference.

 

[devnulllore]

You do not need to change to x86. Windows 7 x64 does not have more overhead it just cashes more memory at boot. You will not see any proformace diffrence in x86 Windows 7.

Not true at all. Windows 7 x64 does have a higher memory footprint, with or without "caching" taken into consideration. It isn't about performance, either. I never said Photoshop would run faster. I said there would be more system memory available to it. Big difference.

I understand, thanks!

 

[whs]

Before you get an idea what Ready Boot may do for you, check whether you have any sigbificant paging traffic. Go to Resource Monitor > Memory tab - there is a small graph on the right bottom called "Hard Faults". If you see a lot of activity there, RB may help - provided you have a stick with an access time of around 1ms. That you can check with HD Tune.

 

[Beta]

When Windows is "caching" it is not using it. Therefor it looks like more ram is being used however it is still there ready to go when you need it.

When I open Adobe Photoshop CS5 (64 Bit) my ram usage goes up by 100mb. I have 2GB of ram which uses 1 GB of ram when nothing is being use. Keep in mind of all of the activators that need to be run for adobe, solidworks, autocad, and media software that will use a good portion of that 1GB of ram. Without those programs installed I get about 640MB of ram being used when nothing is running.

 

[DeaconFrost]

When Windows is "caching" it is not using it. Therefor it looks like more ram is being used however it is still there ready to go when you need it.

And a cache can be dumped if more memory is needed. That's not relevant to my point, though. It is a known, proven fact that Windows 7 x64 has a higher footprint/memory usage than Windows 7 x86.

 

[devnulllore]

Before you get an idea what Ready Boot may do for you, check whether you have any significant paging traffic. Go to Resource Monitor > Memory tab - there is a small graph on the right bottom called "Hard Faults". If you see a lot of activity there, RB may help - provided you have a stick with an access time of around 1ms. That you can check with HD Tune.

OK, yes I saw several hard faults, I don't know what constitutes a lot. But I checked the flash drive I have plugged in now (the cheap PNY 8G slider my wife bought because she thought it was cute) and got 32R/20W and an average access time of 0.7 so since this really didn't cost me anything, my wife paid $9.00 for it, it tests faster than many others I tried that are supposed to be faster, and are way more expensive I am just going to keep this one. If there is even a remote possibility that it will assist Windows in any way I will just leave it alone to do it's thing.

 

[whs]

Your stick is excellent at 0.7ms access time.

Which number of hard faults is critical and significant in RB terms ?? - that is more difficult to answer. I would say if you have a consistent high number of hard faults (like 100/sec), then RB may have an effect.

 

[karlsnooks]

Keep tabs on ReadyBoost with Windows 7's Performance Monitor _ Microsoft Windows _ TechRepublic.com
Monitoring ReadyBoost on Windows 7 - Saveen Reddy's blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
ReadyBoost - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ReadyBoost - Windows 7 features - Microsoft Windows
ReadyBoost Performance Test _ Windows Vista and Windows 7 Help
Take a closer look at ReadyBoost features in Windows 7 _ Microsoft Windows _ TechRepublic.com
Windows 7 Readyboost Really Boosts _ Connected Internet

 

[cluberti]

How much system memory does she have? If it's over 1 GB, then it's been well-proven that you would be seeing the placebo effect and nothing more. Readyboost was designed for systems with less than required system memory, as a way of offering extra memory that was faster than a pagefile.

That isn't actually very true at all - first, it's worth noting that ReadyBoost on systems with less RAM makes it more useful, but it does more than act as a Superfetch / ReadyBoot cache, it can also be used to supplement disk cache (when Windows starts using RAM for disk cache when a disk gets really busy, it will use a ReadyBoost USB key specifically for this). If the hard disk in this machine is relatively slow when under a heavy load of random reads during write or random writes during read, a ReadyBoost key can actually be more than the placebo effect and have a real impact. Just because someone has a lot of RAM doesn't mean using a ReadyBoost key is a placebo. Second, ReadyBoost doesn't get used for RAM at all, it can only be used as a SuperFetch/ReadyBoot cache and disk cache - a ReadyBoost key can't contain anything other than that, meaning it has little effect on RAM (the system will still use approximately the same amount of RAM for a Superfetch cache regardless of whether or not a ReadyBoost key is attached to the system - it'll simply have a *larger* Superfetch cache when one is plugged in).

 

[DeaconFrost]

Just because someone has a lot of RAM doesn't mean using a ReadyBoost key is a placebo.

That's actually been proven one two different enthusiast boards. That's why I posted it...because it's considered fact in the enthusiast community, thanks to plenty of testing on the [H]ardForum and Anandtech boards. The golden line has always been 1 GB of system memory. Under that line, you can see a benefit. Over the line, nothing worthwhile. Those folks are all about real world testing and sharing of results.

It adds extra memory storage to offload a lot of the caching, keeping the main system memory more available for actively running apps. That's the point, to offload the cache to something faster and more responsive than a regular HDD. Ideally, you want it in RAM, but if the system offers too little, Readyboost can help.

 

[whs]

Just because someone has a lot of RAM doesn't mean using a ReadyBoost key is a placebo.

That's actually been proven one two different enthusiast boards. That's why I posted it...because it's considered fact in the enthusiast community, thanks to plenty of testing on the [H]ardForum and Anandtech boards. The golden line has always been 1 GB of system memory. Under that line, you can see a benefit. Over the line, nothing worthwhile. Those folks are all about real world testing and sharing of results.

It adds extra memory storage to offload a lot of the caching, keeping the main system memory more available for actively running apps. That's the point, to offload the cache to something faster and more responsive than a regular HDD. Ideally, you want it in RAM, but if the system offers too little, Readyboost can help.

Deacon,

There is something I do not understand. My understanding of Ready Boost is that it is used as an additionl paging file. The system writes pages that need to be swapped out (page out) to both the pagefile on the HDD and to the stick (the reason it also writes it to the HDD is for safety in case you pull the stick. unexpectedly).

When the page is needed again, it pulls it in from the stick (page in). The performance advantage comes from the much faster access time of a good stick compared to an average HDD (1ms versus 15ms).

You now stipulate that the stick is also used for caching - and I assume you mean independent of any paging activity. This is news to me. I would appreciate if you could post a link of some write-up (preferably by MS) where this mechanism is described. Thank you.