Intel Turbo Memory (Robson) Beneficial?

I understand that Turbo Memory can be beneficial, but my question is a bit more specific...

With the assumption that my laptop will have a 320GB SAA II 3GB/s 7,200RPM HDD would 2GB or 4GB of Intel Turbo Memory 2.0 have any noticable effect in system performance (e.g. boot-up times and frequently-used application start-ups)? I don't question the benefit of Turbo Memory, but I question its value with the high-speed (7,200RPM) HDD suggested above.

Thoughts? Thanks.

 

Intel Turbo Memory serves a similar purpose to Vista's Readyboost feature, and will not have significant, if any performance gains if you have >1GB of RAM. So in your case, I would suggest that you save the money and spend it on things that would have more of an impact on performance (more RAM, larger+faster harddisk, etc.).

 

I was under the impression that ready-boost memory was correlated more to the hdd performance than the memory performance...I won't go into algorithms and platter density and seek times (computer science major, repressing these thoughts, ha-ha). Am I wrong in this thinking, though?

 

Just out of curiosity, what is larger+faster than 320gb 7200rpm as stated above?

 

no, youre not. I have a slow 4200 RPM drive in my notebook, and readyboost makes daily hdd-accessing tasks like opening outlook or firefox notable smoother/faster. apart from theory, it really helps (at least when you got a slow hdd like me, can't tell about other settings)

 

ReadyBoost serves as more (but slower) RAM for the computer - I would say it's more akin to memory. TurboMemory is like permanent ReadyBoost memory, so the computer can save some boot data on it. But the performance gain would be very negligible (especially since you have a 7200RPM HDD).

Haha - I was speaking hypothetically...
But this one is technically larger, although the price is extremely high: http://www.techbuy.com.au/p/98956/HDD_MOBILE_SATA/Seagate/ST9500420ASG.asp

 

Intel's turbo memory does more than just speed up the system.

When on batteries it allows the HDD to power down as some of the systems read and writes are cached on the memory card rather than having to spin up the HDD to service them. This will extend battery life very slightly but is still better than nothing.

It is also supposed to speed up system start up by permanently caching the start up files that readyboot normally builds in memory when Vista starts.

To be honest though, if your laptop comes with it then enable it (why not, its free), if it does not come with it I would not buy it unless you need an extra 5 minutes run time on batteries.