For those of you who are not familiar, Readyboost is a feature built into Vista and Windows 7 that allowed the use of flash drives or cards to act as random access memory.

Windows uses a set portion of the drive as a cache, and superfetch caches important system files to the cache.

I used this in Windows Vista, with mixed results. Tonight I am going to test it in Windows 7, and post my results here. I was hoping others with Win7 and an available mass storage device could share their experiences with this feature as well.

I'll be using a 4GB Kingston Class 6 SD Card which is optimized for random access.

I should notice an improvement in boot time, and random access operations such as internal windows features and the likes.

Not worth buying a usb stick just for it. If you have one hanging around and dont use it, shove it on.

Didn't find no great increases from this.

Yeah supposedly it depends on the configuration. Systems with low ram will benefit the most. Laptops will benefit more since they use 5400rpm drives, so disk write cache can be assigned to the readyboost cache.

Boot time should decrease in any system though, or so I'm told.

With Windows 7, they lifted the 4gb cap and can now use as many drives as you want. Meaning I could put 9 drives in my 9 usb ports and cache them all out.

So I can only imagine with a 32gb drive, it would show a significant increase in performance on even the highest end pcs.

Imagine 8 32gb flash drives, and an SSD for page file

IMMACULATE!!

I do want to see what it will cache and how fast it will cache system files in the newest Windows Server environment...

That could mean alot cheaper 'band-aid' upgrades for home and smb server users.

Don't have to imagine. You can have 200 64 gb thumb drives hooked up to your pc and it wouldn't do jack shit lol. but give you lots of external drive space lol. Marketing gimmick from Microsoft.

IMMACULATE!! waste of money lol

I suggest they start making usb flash drives capable of doing Raid configs. I did some research on this and it IS possible to have usb flash drive's running raid. But only under Linux and requires a lot of bs configuration. So i scraped the idea, but would be a decent concept.


About the only "cheap" cache speed increase i know of is just moving page file to another drive. Even that don't help much at all unless your on a wd green hdd or a low rpm hdd for your os.

For the price of a say 32 or 64 gb HIGHSPEED flash drive your looking at about the same price as a ram upgrade for the pc in question.

My Dad is using this on his laptop but hasn't seen that much of a change... which is surprising because I find his laptop, which has decent specs, is painfully slow.

maybe i'm a little off with this, but wouldn't the USB bus be a bit of a bottleneck for this? well for "high end" systems anyway. i can see systems that have hard drives with an average read/write speed of only 20-30MB/s getting a bit of a boost, but otherwise i just don't see it.

no the files are minimal size.

it's like a hotdog down a hallway with those files.

No big diff. If it we're i'd use a few of my spares for it..

I was about to create a new thread but decided to resurrect this one instead.

So I bought a 16GB USB key last weekend for $9 thinking it would be good for "transferring large files" to my PS3. What I failed to realize at the time was FAT32 has an ~4GB file size limit so the only way to get these files on the key would be to format it NTFS, which then my PS3 wouldn't be able to read - catch22.

I like carrying a USB drive on my key chain at all times, but I already have a ruggedized 1GB stick that seems to do the job for me so I'm starting to think maybe I should consider this new key to be a $9 upgrade to my system.

Are there any more people out there who have tried this out and if so what are you're results? I'll probably try it out tonight regardless but I just wanted to get some more opinions as well.

For anyone that cares - I formatted the drive as exFat, so I could take advantage of a >4GB ReadyBoost file, and because I saw some stuff that said it might be a bit faster than NTFS for this purpose, and ReadyBoost is currently using 10-11GB's on the stick.

I'm not sure yet if it's really speeding performance though but my Windows Satisfaction Index (I know, but I'm too lazy to get some more benchmarking software and do a before vs after test) did go up 0.1 due to my Hard Drive speed, despite having the same drive in there as before. I was hoping the boot times would be cut down nicely but they seem about the same.