Readyboost sucks

I just did a few 3dmark06 tests with my Sager NP5796 with and without my Patriot 4Gb DASH Flash Stick (readyboost ready!). With it I scored around 8400. Without it I scored around 9000. I didn't take screenshots but I am not gonna run it again with readyboost because takes too long but trust me this is for real.

I believe the reason for this is that a FEW sticks barely make the Readyboost "Cut" in that they barely have the speeds to be labeled as ReadyBoost ready. The speeds are then pretty slow, and I believe that these read/write speeds are slower than using HD space (page file).

So, depending on what memory stick you have, it may or may not help you in games. Try running 3dmark06 with and without the stick.

 

Readyboost is just another vista gimmick that has no real practical value.

 

Keep in mind that ReadyBoost isn't really designed to help with in-game performance, anyway. As I understand it, it's more of a "pre-fetch" space so that your most-used applications can load faster. Like Crimson Roses says, there's no real practical value there outside of MAYBE decreasing loading times a little bit.

 

Its for computers with under 1GB to run Vista. Its a Band-Aid, not a performance upgrade.

 

Not really, Lucanesti, no. Having a potentially faster drive to read from wouldn't help a weak-spec'd machine run a more demanding operating system.

It wouldn't be a band-aid, so much as replacing open heart surgery with kissing a boo-boo better - which makes me believe that this is not ready-boost's purpose at all.

 

Multiple benchmarks have shown that systems with 2gigs or more of ram have zero benefits with using readyboost.

As already stated, readyboost is for systems that are lacking ram.

And no, readyboost will not improve your load times at all unless you're system is short ram (where it would need to use the pagefile).

Simply put, readyboost is garbage.

 

I noticed that Readyboost actually caused Vista to use more RAM...

 

so there is absolutely no benefit with using readyboost for vista with 2gb... even with a good usb flash drive?

 

Readyboost increases performance only when your computer is RAM starved and not under normal use. If you don't have enough RAM and try to do a lot of multitasking it will help a bit, but it's pretty much useless if you have 2gigs or more of RAM or for gaming at all.

They even admit it's more of an experiment than a feature, and you have to admit it's a pretty interesting idea to use a flash drive for a pagefile.

 

I'd be curious to know the highs and lows of this kind of test. Take a 4GB memory stick optimized with write caching that also has the fastest possible seek, read, and write times, and compare it to the cheapest 256MB stick on the market that's been used a couple of years already. It seems like there are a lot of factors that could make this technology seem worthless or true to all the hype that's surrounded it.

Also, has anyone experienced the problem of the stick wearing out from continuous use? I've heard that it takes a long time for it to happen, but eventually USB sticks are supposed to fail and Readyboost is supposed to hasten their demise.