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readyboost ready thumbdrives?

A 1GB high speed USB thumbdrive will drastically decrease the amount of hard drive activity (optimizing due to superfetch) on a P4-D 3.2GHz / 3GB RAM / 500GB 7200RPM SATA HDD.

(specifically, the Sandisk 1GB Cruzer Micro U3 that was $5 @ Staples last week - ~9MB/sec write, 14MB/sec read for large files (550MB .iso). I haven't actually done a 4K random read/write benchmark on this drive yet)
 
i have a 4 year old 256MB sandisk mini cruzer that works with readyboost. how come it wont work for others?
 
Boozer said:
i have a 4 year old 256MB sandisk mini cruzer that works with readyboost. how come it wont work for others?
Click to expand...

What do you mean?

For the readyboost drive to improve your performance, it needs to support fast small reads/writes. (4K blocks). A 4 year old USB drive will not benefit nearly as much as a newer USB drive.

A formatted 256MB USB drive is really only ~237MB, right? I didn't think that was enough for Readyboost...
 
Something I noticed, maybe you guys could set me straight

I have 4gb ram right now.
When I plug in a 1gb drive and turn readyboost on, my ram usage stays the same and the flash drive says it's full. When I turn readyboost off, the ram usage still stays the same.

I don't get it. It's caching a bunch of stuff on the flash drive right? Stuff it's not caching on my ram. So, even with 4gb of ram, theoretically I should have a speed increase because of all the extra stuff being cached, right?

Uhg.
 
ReadyBoost is primarily designed to help low RAM systems with increasing caching efficiency over straight physical hard drive pagefile hits. So, with 4GB of system RAM, you're not going to notice the same kinds of performance boosts that ReadyBoost is able to provide for a machine with say, 512MB, or even 1GB or 2GB of system RAM.

It works, but it works better for systems with less RAM - 4GB is considered "extreme" these days, with 2GB being "high end," 1GB being what I'd call "educated," and 512MB called "normal" as far as RAM amounts in the kinds of machines that Joe Average, consumer that happens to own a computer, might have.

Even so, with your 4GB it does help out with the caching of data that gets read back into system RAM from the USB device instead of hitting the far slower pagefile on the hard drive. This isn't the kind of thing that can be measured reliably with just one instance or test - the increased performance is measured over time, not in a moment.
 
My current system is 1GB of RAM right now. When I'm on VISTA, my Hardrive is constantly running in the background that sometimes annoys me. I want to upgrade to 2gb of ram but i'm kinda broke and can't afford it. Buying one of these Readyboost ready thumbdrive will stop this hardrive grinding? Will I gain a significance of speed?
 
EvoFreak said:
My current system is 1GB of RAM right now. When I'm on VISTA, my Hardrive is constantly running in the background that sometimes annoys me. I want to upgrade to 2gb of ram but i'm kinda broke and can't afford it. Buying one of these Readyboost ready thumbdrive will stop this hardrive grinding? Will I gain a significance of speed?
Click to expand...

ReadyBoost will help decrease the constant hard drive activity.

Also, just waiting will help. After a few days (or longer, depending on how much you use your computer, whether or not you leave it on at night, etc), the HDD activity will decrease back to WinXP levels (actually, even less activity than in WinXP for me after ~3 weeks of running vista).

The reason for all the activity is that Superfetch is determining which applications you use the most often, putting them on your drive in locations that can be read the fastest, and intelligently defragmenting your hard drive.

Despite all the activity, it is low priority I/O so it shouldn't be affecting your performance much...
 
I really can't figure out where this "my hard drive is constantly running" stuff comes from. Right now I'm on a P4 2.4 GHz 533 MHz FSB machine built off a Gigabyte mobo, 1GB of mismatched DDR333 sticks (2x512MB), and an 80GB 7200 rpm 8MB ATA133 drive attached to the native Intel ATA100 ATA controller.

I just installed Vista Ultimate 2 days ago and the hard drive doesn't do jack squat at ths point, not even during times where I'm just sitting here staring at Avant and mIRC without so much as an mp3 playing.

And I'm not using the 1GB SanDisk Cruzer USB drive I have that I normally do for ReadyBoost, soooo... maybe I'm just so tough on my hardware compared to Joe Average I get a week's worth of usage in 2 days, but I rarely if ever see any background "thrashing" as people keep making claims about.

/me has yet to figure out what the issue is...
 
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