Vista ReadyBoost

I have a feeling your more than aware of this. But you can use more than a thumb drive with this feature. I’m using a 1 Gig SanDisk SD card with no problems. Although I still feel Vista is a usability nightmare for your average user. I’d have to say this feature is one of the things I’ve found interesting. Although I’m not fully sure it’s real world value is as major as many would hope. Then again the OS is still in beta. I’m sure it supplements my 2 Gigs of Corsair TWINX 2048MB PC3500 DDR 433MHz LLPRO well enough though. How exactly did you determine it wasn’t fast enough?

Censoring comments now? And what exactly did I say that was so out of line as to be deleted? I’m all for deleting **** and spam. But I truly don’t feel anything I wrote was out of line.

I found that if a USB stick doesn’t list its speed on the packaging, it won’t be high speed. I successfully used a 512 MB Cruzer Titanium stick; I’m not sure how much it has helped yet.

The PNY Attache that I have (the 2GB) is a Hi-speed device, and it appears to be able to transfer at about 60Mbit/second (read). I got it working with ReadyBoost, but I had to remove and reinsert it a couple of times before is registered as a performant device. Once it did, it worked every time after that. That was with 5381, so it shouldn’t be too different in 5384.

[...] I was reading Chris Pirillo's blog today and found a post about a feature in Windows Vista:  ReadyBoost.  I went to Microsoft's web site and found a page listing the feature within the performance features of Vista: Windows Vista introduces a new concept in adding memory to a system. Windows ReadyBoost lets users use a removable flash memory device, such as a USB thumb drive, to improve system performance without opening the box. Windows ReadyBoost can improve system performance because it can retrieve data kept on the flash memory more quickly than it can retrieve data kept on the hard disk, decreasing the time you need to wait for your PC to respond. [...]

Wouldn’t you be better served by purchasing actual RAM instead? That way you’re not limited by the limited write capacity of NAND flash and it’s faster to boot.

[...] Vista ReadyBoost [...]

When I was troubleshooting my ReadyBoost issues with the PNY Attache 4GB USB 2.0 thumb drive, I got silly and purchased two 2GB SanDisk high-speed USB (2.0) memory sticks… When I was troubleshooting myReadyBoost issues with the PNY Attache 4GB USB 2.0 thumb drive, I got silly and purchased two 2GB SanDisk high-speed USB (2.0) memory sticks. For those of you keeping track, that’s two 2 twos I snagged. The Cruzer Micro

I too was keen to check out READYBOOST using my 1GB pqi flash drive. HD Tach v3 tells me it has a average read rate of 27MB/sec (which is reasonably fast) but Vista Beta 2 (build 5384) tells me its not fast enough? …Aw :(.

I know Vista is still a Beta release but I could not find a list of flash drives that are currently supported. I am guessing that my flash drive WILL work with future releases, otherwise I will need to purchase a really expensive flash drive that reaches 60MB/sec just to try it out!?!…by which case I’m off buying a second identical hard drive and using Raid striping…

ReadyBoost sounds like a complete gimmick to me. SATA drives advertise max peak throughputs of 3GB/s and are much cheaper than flash drives if you look at the cost per MB. SATA drives sustained throughputs are over 30MB/s which beats most flash drives.

Let’s not forget how fast RAM is compared to flash or harddrives. DDR can get sustained throughputs of over 3GB/s. There’s no way flash memory is even going to come close, and I really doubt it gives any performance advantages unless you only have 256MB-512MB of system ram.

So if you have some flash sticks lying around and have little system ram or disk space left, you can plug some in and you might see some improvement if you’re running lots of apps. Buying flash drives to make use of ReadyBoost is just ridiculous. Buy a bigger harddrive or more ram if you want to increase performance.

Seems to me that ReadyBoost is a marketing gimmick with little practical value.

Okay guys, you all seem to be confused so here are the facts. ReadyBoost does not claim to add physical memory to your system; it takes memory from a flash drive and uses it as a virtual cache for your hard drive. Will this make your games, boot-up times, and file transferring faster? No. ReadyBoost takes advantage of the fact that a USB 2.0 flash drive with decent quality memory is able to send up small chunks of data to the CPU many times faster than a hard drive having to spin up and seek across the platter. Conversely, a hard drive is many times faster than a flash drive when accessing large amounts of sequential data.

i think pluging the flash drive and leaving it many hours there will do damage to the pen drive :’(

How about ReadyBoost on a ramdrive?

I have tried the Sandisk Cruzer Micro 2GB (the tiny one) and an ipod shuffle 1GB (I have yet to test if it still functions). I have been unable to get either of these to work, aside from the fact that the micro benchmark tests exceed the specifications Vista has placed. I have tried format FAT (cruzer standard), FAT32(ipod standard), and NTFS (bye bye Cruzer OS). Nothing has worked. I think this feature is dead in the water.

I bought a Sandisk Cruzer 512 (U3) and had to remove the U3 software before I could use all of the drive. Remember, Vista is somewhat intelligent. It caches applications. Previously on my Pentium 630/2gb 80gb sata, it took about 8 to 10 seconds for my Quickbooks application to load. After installing the flashdrive, it loads in about 1 sec (after loading it once). Other applications show similar results. Word, Powerpoint, … I like it. (Vista beta 2 5384)

Is there any one that has compiled a list of compatible USB:s?
One would think microsoft could provide us with that since they must have tested veeeery many different ones while developing and testing readyboost, but i guess not….
Thanks RStarid for your post! I was very close to buing a Sandisk Cruzer Micro.

Magnus - I’m trying to compile a list of compatible devices. The list is very short at the moment, but hopefully it’ll grow with some user submissions. You can access it here:
http://www.grantgibson.co.uk/misc/readyboost/

Grant.

I was wondering if a usb hard drive (40 gb) could work with ReadyBoost, or a 8 gb flash drive. I think that for some reason it supports up to 128 gb of ram

[...] Date Posted: Sep/28/2006 3:07 PMRating: rseiler said: Does anyone know the speed? Best I can find is what the Titanium version is:Performance: 9MB/second write and >15MB/second read speedsBut I seriously doubt it’s going to be that fast.In CNET’s Review, they say this, which now explains why Sandisk doesn’t advertise the speed:SanDisk makes absolutely no performance claims about the Cruzer Micro, and for good reason: it’s shockingly slow. Our casual test (we averaged the time it took to copy 886.15MB of documents, spreadsheets, music, and movies to the key three times) showed an actual write speed of just 2.2MB per second, or about five times slower than the Crucial Gizmo Overdrive.So, since Vista’s ReadyBoost feature requires a minimum of 2.5MB/sec reads and 1.5MB/sec writes, it would hardly be guaranteed to work, and certainly not as well as others.A comment in this post seems to eliminate all doubt. [...]

Gab, I read there is a 4 GB limit for ReadyBoost.

I would like to see how the gaming community is going to use this. In order to play BattleField2 on my PC, I have to insert the CD (wont run without it), stop tons of running processes to free up as much memory as possible ( I have 1 GB), and then load the game into memory. Wouldn’t it be great if the game came pre-installed on a 1 GB memory key and I got both the game and the additional needed memory in one! That would be a nice thing.

Readyboost does speed up certain games, Ive seen a 20 percent speed increase by using readyboost in one game I tested so far, Sim City 4.

readyboost helps speed things up not by being faster than your hard drive at all taks, but by being faster than your hard drive for specific files of certain sizes. which certain programs use a whole lot of.

but the real test is to find all the apps that will actually improve by using this technology.

You can find a specially designed USB Readyboost drive here in both 1GB and 2GB:

http://gamegiants.net/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=readyboost&x=0&y=0

This is a good chart on flash drives speeds. Here is the link
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/no_nav.asp?cid=6007-8471

This is the main page
http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-8462

It seems that many flash drive/cards are set not to write cache in Windows. My SanDisk Cruiser Mini did not work until I set the hardware properties for the device to “Optimize for Performance”, then all was fine. It can be changed with right click on drive icon and select hardware tab and choose the drive in the window and the properties button below.

Planning to check my SD cards that initially failed the test. Good luck

[...] What happens when a _Windows evangelist_ complains about Windows? http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/05/24/windows-vista-feedback/ ,—-[ Quote ] | I realize this list is lengthy, but…. these reasons are exactly why | I’m afraid Vista won’t be as polished as originally anticipated. | I warn you, this list is long - and it’s only going to get longer, | the deeper I dive into Vista Beta 2. This list is longer than the | interview! `—- A huge list follows Also last night: http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/05/24/microsoft-slows-microsoft-down/ http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/05/24/vista-readyboost/ http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/05/24/outlook-2007-might-not-suck/ ,—-[ Quote ] | It’s not perfect, but it’s showing a bit of promise. They have a lot of | UI work to clean up before I could give this my stamp of approval. `—- That is a lot of bad publicity for one day… [...]

i have apac 512 mb mp3 player readyboost works on it’s flash drive just fine so other usb devices besides usb drives may work also

James and all

you guys are totally wrong. ReadyBoost not only benchmark sequential i/o (which all of you talk about).

SATA Drive are much faster than solid memory in sequential writes/read. Random access is what you need for a RAM. Random access is wrongly measured often as random read/write in MB/s while what you really care is the latency of the memory. RAM get faster and faster with access time improvement not just MB/S of burst transfer.

This kind of benchmark is measured in storage env in IOPS (number of I/O operation in a second). A sata drive gives normally 80 IOPS. A Fibre Channel drive (10krpm) si around 120 IOPS. A FC Drive 15Krpm is around 180 IOPS. A solid state disk/memory or RAM chip is can give over 1000 IOPS.

Just FYI for people who have a SanDisk U3 Cruiser USB Flash drive that doesn’t want to work with like me. I had to use the SanDisk LaunchPad Removal Tool found on the Sandisk site. Formatting the drive does not completely remove the tool even though it appears to work as a normal USB drive.

After I ran the LaunchPad Removal tool it worked great as a ReadyBoost drive.

Im not sure if its the same for all, but i have a hp nc6400 1Gb RAM(integrated) and i added 1GB in the expansion slot. now i found out about readyboost and like u all i tried it out. what it does is use its available memory and allocates it to the RAM. but you wont notice the difference, say on task manager. let me put it this way, when your real RAM will be overloaded it can get what it needs from what ever memory u have allocated to it..(to a maximum of ur computer’s limit of course.). i ve got a 4GB limit, & im thinking of boosting it, just outta curiocity!

Video Help</a> | <a href=”http://feeds.pirillo.com/ChrisPirilloShow”>Add to iTunes</a> Related Content:USB Charger for AirplanesThe Chris Pirillo Switch AdWeird, Strange, and Odd USB GadgetsLive Linux on USBVista ReadyBoost

I have 4 flash drives and none of them work with ReadyBoost. I have an 8gb Sandisk Cruiser Micro, 4gb Kdata MyFlash, 1gb Geek Squad thumb drive and a 128mb Sandisk Cruiser. I tried refomatting them several times, but no luck. I agree that ReadyBoost is just a gimmick. It seems like it has little practical use, but it was still an exam objective on the Vista certification exam. I have never been able to get ReadyBoost to work. I still passed the exam though. What Microsoft really needs is VideoBoost. Why not use a thumb drive to boost your Video RAM so you can use the Aero interface with older video cards? That would be more useful.