[RESOLVED] Flash Drives

[JLS]

I have a friend who would like to know if all usb flash drives support Readyboost?

[fink]

Most newer ones do. I have one older 1 Gig "Datatraveler" that won't... When I tried to use it Windows checked it automatically and said it was not useable presumably because read/write speeds were too slow.

I never found Readyboost to actually be useful but then I never experimented with it in a USB 3.0 capable PC either... all my Readyboost tests were done before I upgraded my PC's to at least 4 Gigs of RAM which was a much better solution.

[JLS]

Fink, I appreciate the reply. So I would assume that the PNY 128GB Turbo USB 3.0 Flash Drive would support Readyboost?

[Steve R Jones]

I would take that bet... If the friend already has the drive - tell him to test it.

[JLS]

He didn't purchase the drive yet.

[Train]

Yes, it should. Maybe make a second or two difference in boot time.

Best bet, a SSD hardrive for C:\ and 4 GB or ram. I have 8 GB installed and have yet, while monitoring, to exceed 5 GB usage while doing video work.

[fink]

Lots of RAM and an SSD is the way to go. When I migrated to an SSD boot time reduced from ~100 to 25 seconds and the time opening/running programs reduced by at least 50%.

Readyboost was really designed for computers that were low on resources. When I try to insert a USB/Readyboost drive now, with my SSD, Windows won't allow it to run because it would actually slow things down... but again my PC is not 3.0 capable so I don't know if it would make a noticeable difference or not. I suspect very little.

[JLS]

I appreciate and thank everyone's replies. Fink, I will pass that info to my friend and advise him not to run a drive with readyboost.

[Train]

Got curious and now see why we got what we did.

Performance

A system with 512 MB of RAM (the minimum requirement for Windows Vista) can see significant gains from ReadyBoost.[12][13] In one test case, ReadyBoost sped up an operation from 11.7 seconds to 2 seconds. However, increasing physical memory (RAM) from 512 MB to 1 GB (without ReadyBoost) reduced it to 0.8 seconds.[14] System performance with ReadyBoost can be monitored by Windows Performance Monitor.[15] As the price of RAM decreased and more RAM was installed in computers, the advantages of ReadyBoost in mitigating the performance deterioration due to insufficient memory decreased.

The core idea of ReadyBoost is that a flash memory (e.g. a USB flash drive or a SSD) have a much faster seek time than a typical magnetic hard disk (less than 1 ms), allowing it to satisfy requests faster than reading files from the hard disk. It also leverages the inherent advantage of two parallel sources from which to read data, whereas Windows 7 enables the use of up to eight flash drives at once, allowing up to nine parallel sources. USB 2.0 flash drives are slower for sequential reads and writes than modern desktop hard drives. Desktop hard drives can sustain anywhere from 2 to 10 times the transfer speed of USB 2.0 flash drives but are equal to or slower than USB 3.0 and Firewire (IEEE 1394) for sequential data. USB 2.0 and faster flash drives have faster random access times: typically around 1 ms, compared to 12 ms for mainstream desktop hard drives.[16]

On laptop computers, the performance shifts more in favor of flash memory when laptop memory is more expensive than desktop memory; many laptops also have relatively slow 4200 rpm and 5400 rpm hard drives.

In versions of Vista prior to SP1, ReadyBoost failed to recognize its cache data upon resume from sleep, and restarted the caching process, making ReadyBoost ineffective on machines undergoing frequent sleep/wake cycles. This problem was fixed in Vista SP1.[17]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost