Vista ReadyBoost

[MaKaVe|i]

So I just purchased a new laptop with Vista Home Premium (64-bit) and I am wandering if getting an SD memory card to use ReadyBoost is even worth my time? I already have a memory upgrade coming that will give me 4gigs. Will I even notice anything using ReadyBoost? Looking for some reviews of people that actually use it. Thanks.

[Ur_Mom]

With 4 GB? Nope. Not at all. It's good for if you have 512-1GB and it hits the HD a lot for the pagefile. Once you get > 2GB of physical RAM, you can actually decrease your overall performance.

With 4 GB, you will not notice ANY improvement whatsoever. With 1 GB, I did notice a difference, a small one. It could have even been psychological...

My opinion? With 2 GB or more, it's a waste of time and money. < 2 GB, you would be better off with a memory upgrade with prices so low. Readyboost is a good idea, but with memory prices so low now, and with such a small increase in speed, it's too little-too late.

[Joe Average]

If you've got a USB stick laying around not doing anything, it can't hurt to use it for ReadyBoost duties regardless of how much physical RAM you have in a machine running Vista. It will be used, it will enhance performance to some degree, so why not plug it in and move on...

Hurting performance... where do people come up with these ideas... geez.

[JimmiG]

I didn't have a USB stick fast enough to take advantage of Readyboost. After doing some research I came to the conclusion that Readyboost is useless with systems that have more than 1GB of RAM. If you have a USB stick or SD card laying around, you might as well plug it in, it only takes a minute or two to prepare it for Readyboost - but it's definitely not worth it buying a USB drive or SD card just for RB, especially now that RAM is so cheap.

[Joe Average]

It's never useless, it's just not as beneficial as it is for systems with 1GB or less, that's what it was designed for. But the entire idea of ReadyBoost sortakinda backfired before it even left the starting gate: the concept for ReadyBoost is over 5 years old, and back then 5 years ago RAM was hella expensive. 5 years ago if you told people we'd be able to buy 4GB of incredibly high speed RAM for under $70 in 2008 you'd probably get some crazy stares in your general direction.

Since RAM is so cheap nowadays and has been for some time now, the actual usefulness of ReadyBoost gets lost in the shuffle. People with 1GB or less probably won't get/haven't bought Vista because they think it'll run like crap (it runs, just not as well as it does with more RAM, room to breathe), or they'll end up spending money on an entirely new machine just to run it adequately. While both ideas do have some merit, neither is an absolute, they're just different shades of Vista you could say.

No matter how much RAM you have in a machine, if you stick in a ReadyBoost capable USB device or any Flash-RAM based compatible product, you'll get a boost for doing so. Might not be anything you'd notice in day to day operation, then again maybe some stuff will just be more responsive compared to pre-ReadyBoost usage.

It can't hurt, can it? 2GB USB sticks are like $10 nowadays. Fry's had a 4GB stick for $15 last week, and it's a twofold device: use it for ReadyBoost duties and portable storage if necessary.

[JimmiG]

Actually, Readyboost is sometimes slows things down: http://techrumor.blogspot.com/2007/01/readyboost-benchmark.html

It's not even worth $10 to use it.. Maybe if you have 512MB RAM.. but with these RAM prices, you might as well pick up a second 512MB RAM stick or even a 1GB RAM stick for the price of a USB stick or SD card...

[Mithent]

Just to note, even without a ReadyBoost drive you should keep the ReadyBoost service enabled, since it also deals with ReadyBoot, which is designed to speed up boot and doesn't require any USB drives.

[xxEIEIOxx]

I bought a high speed SD card for the same purpose. Plugged it into my laptop and turned on ReadyBoost. BSOD. Repeatedly. The SD card is in my camera now. They don't work very well for this purpose.

[DeaconFrost]

The general consensus has been that with 1 GB or less it will help, but with anything over 1 GB you won't see any benefit to it. You'll have 4 GB of system memory soon, so you'll be fine without it.

[Joe Average]

Actually, Readyboost is sometimes slows things down: http://techrumor.blogspot.com/2007/01/readyboost-benchmark.html

It's not even worth $10 to use it.. Maybe if you have 512MB RAM.. but with these RAM prices, you might as well pick up a second 512MB RAM stick or even a 1GB RAM stick for the price of a USB stick or SD card...

Quoted from said linked article above:

UPDATE: Thank you for everyone who gave feedback on this post - indeed there seems to be some type of slowdown because I used a SD card. In the meantime I purchased a Readyboost capable flash drive (Kingston Datatraveller R) and there does seem to be a small improvement in general everyday apps. Small disk accesses like loading thumbnails etc do load much faster.

So his original benchmarks were a bit tainted because of an SD card but he neglected to mention that up front where it should be posted. The article should have been updated with the UPDATE: right at the top because most people would just look for the posted numbers and figure ReadyBoost is useless. As it is, there's some issue he can't identify with SD Flash media specifically in his situation and therefore his original benchmark data then becomes basically invalid for the purposes of his article itself.

I've used SD cards with ReadyBoost before, an OCZ 4GB SD card I grabbed from Fry's for $15 last year and had no issues to note. Using the command line tools for testing read and write speeds it showed a 25MB/s sustained read and 16MB/s sustained write so that's well above the requirements to have ReadyBoost capability on a Flash-RAM device.

For those people having hardware issues, BSODs, or generally shitty performance using SD Flash-RAM media for anything whether it's ReadyBoost or just storage space, it's the drivers for the SD or media card reader, I guarantee it. I've had situations where I used a stock driver that came with an SD card reader (chipset made by Texas Instruments) and had what I considered to be low read/write speeds on the same OCZ 4GB SD card I still have (I'm wearing it out with testing). The laptop with the SD card reader in it was giving me 4.2MB/s sustained reads and 1.7MB/s sustained writes which is well below what this card is capable of.

I did some digging around, found a driver that was far more current (the original was dated from early 2006, the newer one was February 2008) and wham, when I updated the driver to the latest one (found at Acer's FTP driver site, actually) the read speed jumped to 31MB/s sustained and writes were 22MB/s sustained - this is on the same SD card reader with the same SD card but an updated and apparently far more efficient media card reader driver.

Consider this scenario:

Get 2x2GB sticks of some high speed RAM for your 2-RAM slot mobo for around $70-80, grab a 4GB USB stick for $15-20, so $90-100 or so out of pocket. Not all mobos will support 8GB of RAM, and not everyone wants that much RAM anyway (shame on you!!!). So with 2x2GB = 4GB of physical RAM and a 4GB USB stick (hopefully a decent one with good read/write speeds) for ReadyBoost = a far snappier machine than just the 4GB of RAM will allow all by themselves.

I'm not saying 4GB of physical RAM and a 4GB USB stick for ReadyBoost equals the performance of an actual 8GB of physical RAM, but I am saying it can't hurt and will improve system performance and give it a far more snappy responsiveness.

Some people don't notice ReadyBoost when it's in operation, others do. I notice it because I know what to look for whenever I'm doing some Vista testing (I don't use Vista as a day to day OS, just for tutoring and testing purposes). As I said before, it can't hurt...