ReadyBoost Flash ?

What's the skinny on ReadyBoost USB Flash Drives.
Can they be considered addtional RAM?
Can I improve my laptops performance by plugging in a flash drive?
What is the processing speed of these drives and how exactly do they work?

 

No.
Barely.
They function like a SSD.

 

Im using a 2gb readyboost with my 2gb of RAM, and id say the gain is negligiable, if theres any gain at all

 

I've read that Windows Vista utilizes it fairly efficiently for things like boot-up.

 

I've read that Kennedy was killed by space aliens and Elvis is still alive.

 

ReadyBoost is basically worthless tech, don't even bother with it.

 

thanks for the clarity...

 

A few benchmarks ive seen showed increase on load times and gaming fps IF you dont have much ram installed like 1GB RAM only.

I still leave mine plugged into my quickdock anyway just incase it does anything. Havent noticed much of a difference to be honest.

 

Yeah it's a nice help for starved solutions, and for returning from sleep and boot up. It's nowhere near the same bandwidth as system memory, but it's faster seek times and improving transfer rates make it a good harddrive helper.

Here's a few benchies from a site posted in the forums earlier;

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=12408

 

So the conclusion is ReadyBoost is on par with the whole Vista experience Microsoft has given us, so-so ideas implemented badly?

 

Yeah, in a nutshell, that's about it.

 

I read in the Vista SP1 review on the other thread that the ReadyBoost will be improved

 

Did they mention how it will be improved?

I have one of the 1 gig turbo memory modules, and I was hoping that while on battery, it would allow the hdd to turn off when i'm just surfing the net, or working in office, but I guess that was too much to ask for...
The theory behind it sounded so good and it did cut off like 3 seconds from start up time, but that's pretty much it.

 

The only thing ready boost did (for me) was that it occasionally (about 1/6 of the time) made Vista hang on startup.

 

I have the same module, and it pretty much never accesses the HDD when surfing (this was even before I switched to SP1) as long as I don't require an app to run something like flash. etc.

Did you download the Robson update patch from intel, and have you turned off the automatic search indexing feature in Vista?
Both of those are required to actually make it useful, especially the later otherwise Vista keeps trying to optimize your search.... and kill your battery.

 

Yeah it still has issues on startup even with the current SP1 candidate, sometimes forgetting where the ReadyBoost is located or the settings you've set for it. Never had a crash, but have noticed it not using it (if the Corsair blue light isn't blinking it's not working).

That's my major complaint, along with sometimes not wanting to return from sleep just locking up for about 30 seconds to once just over a minute. Always came back for me, but has hung for long enough periods that if I didn't know about the issue I probably would've rebooted instead. Real Pain, especially since the benefit when returning from sleep is making the return time 3-5 seconds instead of 15, anything making it longer is not a feature!

I've found that it helps the most with returning from sleep, and that the help in startup is there but minor, because like I mentioned, it's still there even with a hyper fast RAM drive which is almosy as fast as the bus itself.

 

The only issue I seem to have with it, is on startup it seems to take forever to cache, the mem card light stays on for a while.