Comments on: Vista ReadyBoost

By: Woody Dewar

Woody Dewar — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:52:53 +0000

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.

By: tony

tony — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 04:54:03 +0000

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!

By: mustardman

mustardman — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 18:22:15 +0000

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.

By: Stefano

Stefano — Thu, 10 May 2007 20:16:56 +0000

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.

By: john

john — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 23:21:17 +0000

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

By: [News] Vista Complaints

[News] Vista Complaints — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 06:29:19 +0000

[...] 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… [...]

By: Gregg Goodpaster

Gregg Goodpaster — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 02:17:34 +0000

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

By: Badcarma98

Badcarma98 — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 13:18:34 +0000

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

By: nelson

nelson — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 10:53:33 +0000

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

By: JS

JS — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 19:57:07 +0000

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.

By: Zach

Zach — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 19:30:28 +0000

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.

By: FatWallet Forums - SanDisk Cruzer Micro 2GB USB drive Make ~$9.50 AR/PM to OD @ CC YMMV

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 23:19:58 +0000

[...] 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. [...]

By: Gab

Gab — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 19:52:59 +0000

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

By: Grant

Grant — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:38:34 +0000

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.

By: Magnus

Magnus — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:48:22 +0000

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.