ReadyBoost and perfomance

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mito

Gawd
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Mar 27, 2006
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I was reading about Vista's ReadyBoost feature.

If Vista runs out of memory, it'll use first the registered USB flash device instead of the swap file in the HD. This should be much faster.

Have you guys tried it out?

Since I'm using Vista 64 with only 2Gb I was considering the purchase of a 1Gb USB Flash stick. So if I'm running a game that exceeds 2Gb, I hope this 1Gb USB stick will kick in, thus I won't notice much performance degradation.

This solution is much cheaper than buying an extra 1Gb stick.

Discuss. Thanks............
 
It gives a slight performance boost...but its only noticeable with a 1GB or less. While it does provide a cheaper performance solution, it does not give anywhere near close the benefit of actual ram.
 
Yeah it doesn't do that much for performance, its pretty unnoticeable. USB sticks are very slow. Like 20MB/s for faster ones vs ~6000MB/s for DDR2-800. Regular harddrives can do about ~60-70MB/s, but USB sticks can be faster for small files. Basicly if you have a spare USB stick sure use it, but otherwise I wouldn't go out and buy one just for readyboost.
 
JohnleMVP said:
Yeah it doesn't do that much for performance, its pretty unnoticeable. USB sticks are very slow. Like 20MB/s for faster ones vs ~6000MB/s for DDR2-800. Regular harddrives can do about ~60-70MB/s, but USB sticks can be faster for small files. Basicly if you have a spare USB stick sure use it, but otherwise I wouldn't go out and buy one just for readyboost.
Click to expand...

They use flash memory for Readyboost because of the much faster seek times, not for the transfer rate.
 
I know thats why I said it was faster for small files. I talked about speeds because the OP though it was a cheap ram alternative which its not. ("So if I'm running a game that exceeds 2Gb, I hope this 1Gb USB stick will kick in,")
 
you guys just shattered my plans of using a USB memory stick to hold the swap file.

thank you.










:D
 
Yeah I tried it with a sandisk cruzer readboost usb and it actually slowed my system down some stuf was really fast and other stuff was much slower not worth it IMO
 
mito, easy enough to check it out yourself. 1GB USB sticks are pretty cheap and they're useful. I have the same setup as you and I tried it, but didn't notice any improvement. But then most of my games run in the 1.5GB - 1.7GB range, so I'm not really stressing my PC enough to where it's making heavy use of the swap file. If you've already got a 64bit OS and you're running into memory limits, I think it's a no brainer to just add more RAM. It will be a lot faster than using virtual memory and trying to make the swap drive fast.
 
I found it to be very beneficial on my laptop (1gb of memory) due to the slow 5400 rpm HD. It really helped to reduce paging activity on a slow HD.
 
Beware, vista doesn't save the info on the stick between boots, it rebuilds it everytime you boot, so you'll get some thrashing while it pulls data from the swap file, encrypts it, and sends it to the flash drive.
 
Rabidfox said:
Beware, vista doesn't save the info on the stick between boots, it rebuilds it everytime you boot, so you'll get some thrashing while it pulls data from the swap file, encrypts it, and sends it to the flash drive.
Click to expand...

I was just going to make a thread asking something like this...

I just bought one since compusa has the PNY 4GB Attache for $34, Im only about 5 minutes into it but im noticing a huge difference so far, I restarted my PC and i looked down after pressing shutdown for about 10-15 seconds later after hitting shut down the pc was going back into the desktop, now that is friggin quick.

Programs and stuff seem much quicker also, it must be cause of my 1gb of ram i have only.
 
I couldn't measure any improvement on my 1GB laptop with Vista. It was dog ass slow either way, with our without my 2GB SDMicro Flash card being used for Ready Boost.
 
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