Internal Readyboost Drive for Dell XPS M1530?

Right now I took a spare 1gb Sandisk Ultra II SD card i had lying around and am using that for Readyboost.

Would i see any real benefit to getting say, a 4gb Extreme III SD card? Or one of those Lexar expresscard 4 or 8gb flash drives?

Specs of laptop:

Dell XPS M1530
Vista Home Premium
2.2ghz Core 2 Duo 4mb L2
3gb DDR2-667 in Dual Channel mode
160gb 7200RPM SATA HD
Nvidia 8600GT 256mb GDDR3 using laptopvideo2go 169.04 driver

 

Probably not much, I bought a 4GB PNY SDHC from Best Buy for 35 bucks and am currently using that, it speeds up a few of my more common programs and stops some caching from the hard drive. Btw, Readyboost only accepts a maximum of 4GB's.

 

I thought the maximum on ReadyBoost is 1 gigabyte.

 

Your thinking of the Intel Turbo Memory which has the 512MB or 1GB limit. The Readyboost is 4GB.

 

EDIT: You are right, I looked it up on wikipedia, and it says 256mb-4 gigs can be assigned.

 

"3gb DDR2-667 in Dual Channel mode"
you most definitely have enough RAM, unless you are doing anything REALLY memory intensive, you probably wont notice any difference if you pop in a lexar 4GB ssd into the express card slot. I have the same configuration as you and I was planning on doing the exact same thing. I did some research and it doesn't seem to be worth it. I rarley even begin to use 50% of the 3GB ram on my machine.

P.S. if you do decide to go ahead and get the lexar SSD 4GB and try it with readyboost, please send me a message and let me know how it went! Thanks.

 

I have the intel turbo memory, and 2.5 gigs of ram, and pretty much the only difference I notice is, I kid you not 3 sec faster boot up time, and about 20-30 min extra battery life when I set it on power saver. For the 25 bucks I paid for it, I think it's worth it for the extra battery life alone.

 

Ya I like it but to everyone your mileage may vary. I'm about to get 4GB's of RAM and an Intel Turbo Memory 1GB and see how that goes. BTW if you wanted Bestbuy has a 4GB SDHC PNY card that I am currently using for my Readyboost.

 

What is the fastest possible interface AND card for ReadyBoost on a Dell M1530 XPS with an ExpressCard slot and an 8 in 1 card reader slot, i.e. is ExpressCard - which some say runs at USB speeds due to notebook design limitations and others say can run in a Dell m1530 at the faster 2.4 gig/s PCIE speeds - a faster interface than any of the formats that can be read in the 8 in 1 reader - which most say are limited to USB speeds; AND will a Lexar 16 gig Expresscard running in a m1530 interface at PCIE speeds or at USB speeds? If the Lexar in an m1530 will only run at USB speeds, then is there a 8 in 1 card option that will effectively run just as fast?

Cost is not a factor and am aware of negligible gains, but would still like to know what is best. Thnx.

 

I don't know if vista can use an ExpressCard slot for readyboost, it might be limited to the USB interface, but I do not know that for a fact.

 

i see that the ready boost has a minimum requirement read speed of 2.5mb
how do i know my current sd card is capable of this speed

 

Run HDTach or a similar benchmark to test speeds.
(PS, be advised many intergrated card readers run slower than the max throughput, I've seen a few capped between 3-6MB/s when the card i faster). Always check both the reader and then an external reader separately.

For anyone with above 2 GB, the impact is minimal for performance, but it can be helpful recovering from sleep and avoiding spinning up the HDD when caching word documents etc.

 

ReadyBoost is available on the drives like the Lexars, and they are not limited to USB, they have access to a single PCIe 1.0 lane and on top of that can have access to USB bandwidth. In this case the drives would be using the PCIe interface exclsively.

A little pricey, but here's the 4GB model;
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820191056

 

I have a 4gb readyboost plugged in. Its useless, dont bother if you have more than 2gb ram

 

will there be a difference if i used a regular SD compared to a SDHC card for readyboost?

Or is the performance difference for the price not worth it?

 

SD and SDHC make little difference.

An Exteme III SDHC 4GB is pretty much the same speed as a stand SD 2GB Extreme III card.

Main this is to look for the cards with 'known' consistent throughput levels.
Go for fast SD (1GB and over) over slow SDHC, but if you can do both (like 4GB of EIII) then that's OK.

If you want 'fastest' though then either you need fast MMC+ if you want the SD form factor just under 25/50MB/s depending on mode, or else Compact Flash if you want the fastest of the bunch just over 50MB/s read. A FireWire reader is the fastest way to go for those (FireWire 800 for the fastest CF), but a USB reader should be fine for SD cards.

 

Is the 2gig or 4gig cards a better option than the internal FCM? Aside from the obvious capacity differences, would the interface of the FCM be an advantage in speed?