Readyboost on SD card on decent laptop?

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Burticus

Supreme [H]ardness
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I played with readyboost back in the Vista era and didn't really feel the love for it. And everything I have read indicates it has the best benefit for low powered stuff with insufficient ram.

But I keep seeing these deals on 32gb SD cards for like $30 and I can't get it out of my head. Would one of these help in my win 7 laptop using readyboost or maybe fancycache (only if it's free, I didn't read up on that much)

Laptop is a Gateway A8 3500 with 8gb ram. HD is a slow WD 5400 rpm. Yeah I know, a $150 SSD would go a long way (and this thing does have 2 hard drive bays, I may go that route) but the prospect of getting a $30 easy upgrade is tantalizing...

Anyone? Bueller? Maybe I just buy one with Amazon GC and if it sucks send it back, heh.

Edit - just saw a 16gb SD class 10 on meritline for $13.... even cheaper!
 
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I dont know how much a benefit you would see even with a SDHC class 10 card. The class 10 SDHC cards are rated for 10mb/s sequential reads and writes and much slower for non sequential reads and writes.. I would think that you would see a small benefit when accessing small non sequential data from the SDHC card to make up for the head movement of the HDD. Trying to access or transfer a large file from the SDHC would be painfully slow. I dont know how readyboost caches files on the readyboost enabled drive. It may take larger files and split them into many smaller files, which would show improvement over a low RPM HDD. For $13 there really isnt any reason not to just try it out yourself. If it works out then it was money well spent. If not, you could use the card in some other device or sell it. Either way you wont be out much money.
 
ReadyBoost is useless. I have a Kingston Class 10 in my phone, and it performs very well indeed. But even a good 5400 RPM drive will by far outperform any ReadyBoost setup if it is coupled with a decent CPU and enough RAM.

If you want the boost, go full SSD.
 
Burticus said:
And everything I have read indicates it has the best benefit for low powered stuff with insufficient ram.
Click to expand...

Which is pretty much the only reason Readyboost exists-- a stop gap solution for users that want to run the latest version of Windows on hardware that is incapable of accepting more than 1GB of RAM (or if it's cost prohibitive to upgrade RAM e.g. RDRAM). Anything more than 2GB of RAM and you're going to see virtually no performance increases using Readyboost.

I would save up for a SSD instead.
 
No need to shell out $150 for an SSD to get the improvement you're after. Even a 32GB SSD would give you a huge boost over your current situation.
 
I'd need a 128gb SSD to cover the current C and have a little room to grow.... I was more interested in a cheaper solution for caching purposes. I guess caching isn't quite there yet.
 
Burticus said:
I'd need a 128gb SSD to cover the current C and have a little room to grow.... I was more interested in a cheaper solution for caching purposes. I guess caching isn't quite there yet.
Click to expand...

You said you have 2 hard drive bays though. Best economical short-term solution is a small SSD for booting Windows and running your essential apps off, with your HDD in bay 2 for data and lesser-used apps. You don't need all of your stuff on an SSD to get a huge speed boost from one. Putting your music and documents on an SSD doesn't net tangible benefits.
 
You can also setup a smaller SSD to be used as a cache drive if you use fancycache.

That way, you get the SSD speed from all your apps, even if your usage dramatically changes without having to move the installs from one drive to the other.
 
You could also go for one of those hybrid disks which have an integrated SSD as supporting cache. They're quite good, especially boot times improve I've heard. I forgot which manufacturer it is, but they have something for about 100 bucks.
 
/rant/ said:
You could also go for one of those hybrid disks which have an integrated SSD as supporting cache. They're quite good, especially boot times improve I've heard. I forgot which manufacturer it is, but they have something for about 100 bucks.
Click to expand...

Seagate Momentus XT. They come in 500gb with 4gb flash memory or 750gb with 8gb flash memory.
 
The goal here is to not spend a lot of money. Obviously a $100 SSD will solve the problems. Thanks for all the replies, I pretty much confirmed it's a waste of time.
 
Newegg had a cheap 32gb ssd for like 40 bucks. Not much more than your initial quesstimate.
 
Ready boost makes a difference on a system with say ..... a USB 3.0 thumbdrive that is rated for 60 MB/s or higher reads.
 
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