ReadyBoost and SuperFetch?

D

Dario D.

Gawd
Joined
Dec 8, 2004
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Anyone know much about ReadyBoost and/or SuperFetch?

I'm having a hard time understanding how using a flash drive as RAM (ReadyBoost) is going to help load frequently-used programs faster (SuperFetch), if my flash drive can only transfer files at about 10mbps.

Now, Wikipedia says:
Although hard disks usually have higher data transfer rates, flash drives can be faster for small files or non-sequential I/O because of their short random seek times.
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But my preloaded apps aren't going to consist of tiny files (massive graphics/design apps, and games).

Are there perhaps much, much faster flash drives that I should be using? And does ReadyBoost really help? (I already have 4 gigs of RAM, but suffer tremendously under the weight of hard-drive speed for what I do - even though I use some of the fastest hard drives ever made - so I'm trying to find ways to get stuff to load faster, among other things... in this case, by having ReadyBoost use SuperFetch more)
 
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ReadyBoost is mainly for MUCH weaker systems that have very little RAM (say 1 GB or less). Many benchmarks have shown it has little if any performance improvement if you have 2 GB or greater of RAM.

That said I used to have 2 GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro. When running Age of Conan I did notice a little difference with a 1GB flash drive used for ReadyBoost. Then I upgraded to 4 GB and got a very nice performance bump. Tried the 1 GB flash drive again and it gave me zero performance increase after upgrading to 4 GB of RAM.
 
Superfetch is basically an algorithm that monitors your program usage that is built into Vista and 7. It just monitors what programs you use and when you use them, then at those times, it automatically beings loading those files into ram so that when you launch the program, it launches faster. Now, some type of files I've been told it can't load, I've heard only libraries but I've watched my disk manager shortly after boot and it does seem to load up quite a bit of files from games and such if I'm playing them a lot every day. So I don't know the exact answer to what type of files. Superfetch is a little different in 7 because it's not quiet as 'aggressive', I guess is the word. With Vista, when it wants to cache, it does it and some people report that it really bogs down the system. That doesn't seem to happen with 7.
 
With Vista x64 on my main rig (see sig) I saw no benefits from an additional 4GB OCZ Dual Channel USB stick as superfech in relation to games, VM's, office applications or light photo work-

I had noticed improvements on an older system w/ 1 GB of ram.

Unless you already have one I would say a Raid array is your best hope.
 
I would have bet damn good money that this was an almost three year old thread that was resurrected. I would have lost.
 
DeaconFrost said:
I would have bet damn good money that this was an almost three year old thread that was resurrected. I would have lost.
Click to expand...

It would have looked that way. Maybe one of the many people that were still on XP just now upgrading.
 
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