Has anybody tried readyboost?

I am buying a laptop in a couple of months and was wondering if anybody has tried vista's readyboost with either a usb pen or an integrated card reader?

At the moment in the UK you can purchase the fasted 2GB sd card for £17 so if it works investing in something with a card reader would be worth it.

 

I use it all the time, it definitely speeds things up a significant amount. It's also well worth getting a USB drive instead of a card, as it can be generally used as well.

 

As far as I know, readyboost doesn't work with card reader through USB, only built-in ones.

Also, it seems that many built-in card readers are pretty slow. So unless you intend dual use(digital camera, mp3 players etc.), a USB flash drive should be better.

 

I tried ReadyBoost with a fast 2GB SD card. I didn't notice performance benefits but I did see a significant improvement in battery life for DVD playback. I think Vista was caching the DVD onto the SD card.

Personally, I would not want to use USB for ReadyBoost. It's more convenient to keep the card in the slot all the time and there's no risk of causing the computer to be confused if the ReadyBoost media is removed while it is sleeping / hibernating (a USB stick would need to be removed before putting the computer into its bag).

John

 

ah, that is a good point.

Though there is a thing I don't understand, for DVD playback, I assume it is kind of a "read-once" operation so how can it save battery life(well there may be some but is surprised at the significant part).

 

Using ReadyBoost with the SD card it seemed that the DVD drive was running intermittently, not continuously. I also noticed that the battery lasted longer. I therefore assume that Vista was reading a part (not a very big part, maybe 100MB) of the DVD into the the SD card then playing it from there.

All these solid state memories (except the expensive SSDs) have very quick access times but slower data transfer rates than normal HDDs. I assume the benefit of ReadyBoost comes with the near instant access of small amounts of data.

Going back to the original question of whether a media card slot is a desirable feature, I would say yes, because I find it more convenient to use this method to transfer photos from my digital camera than to connect a cable.

John

 

why not use an expresscard ssd? i have a 16GB ssd via expresscard from lexar, quite useful in my opinion and was about $150. works with readyboost and I have a large amount of space for any files i want

 

I would loooove to but I can't seem to find drivers for my laptop's built in card reader for Vista64.

 

Theoretically, ReadyBoost won't become confused if you just pull out a USB key for it because it's pagefile data, and should be written both to the pagefile and the USB key.

But that's just my understanding of it Someone should test that.

 

Your absolutely right. I've tested it (with my built-in card reader) and nothing really happens. Nothing gets confused and everything starts up fine after hibernation or sleep mode.

 

The lexar expresscard SSD's are really slow compared to high speed SD or USB flash drives.

 

My notebook only has cardbus. If there is a cardbus version, I would.

BTW, can you boot from this device ?

 

That is surprising as I thought they would put in some special stuff to speed things up and expresscard are not supposed to be limited by the bus(e.g., an USB drive can only get about 50% from its bus throughput in real world use).