Readyboost does this thing actually work ?

[DerChef]

Hi All not quite Windows on the Mac but maybe somebody has input on this

I have an oldish Dell dimension P4 2.66 GHZ with 1 GB Ram, old hardly on the scrapheap yet.

Installed Vista on a partition to dual boot. Eventually got the thing licked into shape after lots of initial compatibility issues.

Anyways they are sure not wrong about it being resource hungry so I read about this readyboost facility and bought A Patriot Exporter XT 4GB being told it was the best for this.

Used almost all of it as a readyboost cache. Basically not only did it not seem to actually help performance much but I would almost swear it was disk swapping MORE!

Also after a few days it stopped seeing the readyboost cache and said the USB drive was not formattted ! Reformatted it to default FAT32. Same thing happened worked for a week without being of much benefit then said the drive was not formatted.

I have tried the USB drive on different USB ports on different cards in the machine ALL USB2. I am using the Patriot for something else now and its fine no problem with it.

So Does Readyboost simply not work too well

I have been on the net and turned off a few fancy graphical features in the aero interface and this has had a real BOOST to performance much more so than USB drives

 

[CanadaRAM]

Basically, no.
If you spend the money on increasing real RAM (which by default works to decrease disk swapping) instead of on the slow USB Flash stick, you will see better performance

 

[LMO]

This may answer some questions:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx

 

[katorga]

Nope

It is a waste of time.

1. disk drives are faster than the flash devices
2. Windows can only statically pre-load apps to a readyboost device (too many writes kills flash drive)

Since you can install a mac app basically anywhere, just run your app from a flash drive to see if you can tell a speed difference.

 

[mrfrosty]

I don't think it's a waste of time at all. It does help out. Readyboost is about increasing performance of crap machines, not making fast machines faster.

How much of a speed increase are we talking about?
A: Well, that depends. On average, a RANDOM 4K read from flash is about 10x faster than from HDD. Now, how does that translate to end-user perf? Under memory pressure and heavy disk activity, the system is much more responsive; on a 4GB machine with few applications running, the ReadyBoost effect is much less noticable.

And with 1Gb RAM on Vista you have alot of memory pressure.

 

[katorga]

Readyboost is cache

Ready boost is cache so it frees up some memory, but when was the last time loading an windows app from disk consisted of lots of random 4K reads. It is sequential megabytes that are read.

I kinda forgot about readyboost when I saw the anandtech article showing it slowing down systems.