Windows Readyboost Speed?

[Theory5]

Hey, my friend got a sandisk 8gb flash drive with readyboost. I am wondering what readyboost can do. I think it acts more like a paging file (virtual memory) but my friend insists that it acts like actual physical RAM. What is it really? and what speed would it run at? Will he be able to run games faster(which is what more physical ram would allow)? or just run programs like opera and ventrilo and AIM faster(which is what more virtual memory would allow)?

[freeztar]

The wiki on readyboost seems a good place to start:

ReadyBoost - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

It seems that readyboost can indeed speed up access times, but as noted in the wiki, it is best at random access requests. So for stuff like streaming video, a regular hard drive (IDE/SATA/PATA) would be just as fast, and in the case of a flash drive hooked through USB, the regular hard drive would perform much better because of limitations of USB and flash access times for sequential access. For games, I suppose it would depend a lot upon the particular game. :shrug:

[alexander]

Discussed this extensively when M$ announced vista, ReadyBoost can only minimally and sometimes improve your performance, but only slightly, and sometimes....

[freeztar]

Discussed this extensively when M$ announced vista, ReadyBoost can only minimally and sometimes improve your performance, but only slightly, and sometimes....

 

Have you run tests Alex?

[alexander]

it basically acts as swap space... basically the only time you see any performance out of it is when you are using your HD controller really hard and need swap space that gets shadowed out to the thumb drive, thus you get to use the, at the time, unused controller for swapping...

[freeztar]

it basically acts as swap space... basically the only time you see any performance out of it is when you are using your HD controller really hard and need swap space that gets shadowed out to the thumb drive, thus you get to use the, at the time, unused controller for swapping...

 

Oh, like "pseudo-cache"? :lol: :)

 

Don't get me wrong, it's not something that I would dish out $ for, but it doesn't really suit my current computing needs and besides, I don't use Vista.

 

Nonetheless, I could see how this might be beneficial for people who have databases spread across multiple external flash drives that need speedy random access, whoever they may be. :hyper:

 

So you haven't run tests Alex?

[alexander]

nothing official, to satisfy your question, freezy :hyper:

[buddyzen]

O_O waste of 2 8gb flash drives