Readyboost on USB 3.0

If I have 4gb of 1600Mhz RAM, do you think a USB 3.0 flash drive dedicated to readyboost would increase performance?

I know readyboost wasn't that great before, but I wonder if it is more impressive with USB 3.0.

 

I doubt it would be any better since the technology itself is what needs improvement, not the bandwidth. But try it for yourself and let us know, things could be different for you. You can always take it off it you don't notice any benefit.

 

I would think that any machine that has USB v3 can also accommodate more than 4Gb of ram.

Spend your $$ on ram, it will be faster than RB and the OS just might use it more effectively.

Unless the user has messed with some very low-level parameters, any recent MSFT OS will always use as much ram as possible for disk and OS-level caching, giving up ram to program calls as required. RB is a cheat that inserts slower flash memory into the default caching scheme.

Not to say that RB isn't effective in some cases, but more ram will likely be more effective.

 

I plan on upgrading to 8GB eventually, but I already have a flashdrive I can test with. Once my new lappytop comes in.

I'll post back with results later.

 

USB flash, even 3.0, is still very very slow compared to the SSD drives on the market. Now there are SATA drives with USB interface.

 

I would imagine they are significantly more expensive than a flash drive?

 

don' waste you time on readyboost given today's RAM price.

 

If you got a native USB 3.0 interface, and a USB 3.0 memory pen formatted to ExFat you can dedicate the whole drive for Readyboost.
I tried it with my 16gb one and it worked.

But if it will increase performance i have no idea. D:

 

Unless your flashdrive can run at full usb v3 speeds you'll be wasting your time.

A USB v3 interface does NOT magically make an older/slower device run faster.

 

2 quick points, I think you should be able to support more than 4GB RAM if you have USB 3.0 ports, if you can't then it's time to sell that machine on eBay and get one that can support more than 4GB. It's ironic because 4GB is now the new minimum that laptops should be sold with, making 6GB a more middle standard to strive for. I think 8GB is a solid maximum for now unless you are doing photo editing and video editing all at the same time, in which case I would upgrade your laptop build to something in Dell XPS/Precision/Latitude line-up.

Honestly, as good as SSD's are, I believe that SATA Drives with Cache like the Momentus XT (500gb w/4GB Cache) are probably going to be the future are more than likely going to lead the world, at least for the moment with the way how expensive SSDs really are. If your laptop supports a mSATA, then I would recommend getting this, which isn't expensive and gives you enough space for Applications and Windows 7.

 

indeed. I haven't seen a flash drive that saturate USB 2.0 yet. Many people forget that the speed of SSD(not just the latency but throughput) comes from its channels (8/10), not because of the NAND.

 

Agreed, I remember the ruckus that was when people discovered that kingston was ''pirating'' itself, basically they launched 2 different lines of thumb drives, one with a good controller and one with some controller. So they sold the latter as pirate products and the former as legit products. The problem was that there were mix ups, and a lot of the some controller went to legit retail stores, when it was discovered there was some not pleased costumers like me that got affected by this, the some controller has half the transfer rate of an ''original'' drive.

 

ReadyBoost doesn't work unless you're limited on RAM, and 4GB isn't limited, more like 1GB RAM. It was meant as a temporary stop gap to improve performance until you got more RAM. But with 8GB RAM kits so cheap, best to just invest in it and be done. In theory it sounds great, and while some benchmarks may show improvements, I doubt you'd be able to tell any difference. If you have an SSD it may actually hinder performance because it'll be much slower than any SSD.

Even if it is USB 3.0 it all depends on the 512KB and 4KB performance of the flash drive too.

 

You guys are missing the point. A usb3.0 drive can be used for more than just readyboost whereas ram is just ram. The original question was about whether a usb3.0 readyboost drive will increase performance, stop suggesting buying ram or ssd. I am in a similar position, i want to buy a new usb drive and am considering a 16gb usb3.0 sony with a rated read speed of 120mb/s. Would a drive that fast help if i use it for readyboost? Keep in mind it will be used for other stuff too so dont suggest buying more ram!

 

Ready boost is there to help the drive out, not the CPU, GPU or Ram. What it does is load from the HDD comonly used files and apps. It does this right after boot. Where as spare ram also caches files eventually these files can get flushed where they are more easdily available from the SSD. It usually does this with the smaller fies as the stream speed of a usb drive is slower the access time is much faster.

So if you have a non hybrid HDD this can help boot and load times. The slower the drive RPM the more it will help. You may see and feel a bit more snapyness in some places but there is no real synthetic bencmark, other than say a boot timer, that will show a significant benefit.................

 

so its basically like a poor man's hybrid drive. i think it only caches windows system files and not programs. i think it would have some some boot time benefits for 5400 hdds. wonder if its of any benefit for systems with 7200 or faster.

 

Actually the hybrid drive is better as it caches all within its buffer. Also the buffer does not need to load nor does it differntiate between data,MFT or executables etc.

As far as boot times etc it does somewhat help 7,200's but yes it is much more of benefit to a 5,400......................

 

actually, it's the usb 2.0 protocol that does not allow them to go any faster. usb 3 sticks that are much faster are out there already, quite a few.

it's a messed up file transfer protocoll in the usb 2.0 standard that does not allow you to go beyond 25 or so MB/s without a special non-standard driver. so far, i know of only one external hdd maker that created that. one could go up to 45MB/s or something on that drive, was quite cool. and on systems without the driver, it took the ordinary usb2.0 protocoll and was back to the ~25MB/s

i had usb3 sticks with >70MB/s, so they definitely exist. sadly, one can not boot from them in usb3 mode, which made my concept of installing-windows-from-usb3 mood.

to the op:
if you have it lying around and are not using it, just try it. there's no harm. most likely, there's no gain as well. but trying doesn't cost you anything.

and then, get more ram. in the new system, as you stated.

 

My corsair flash voyager 32gb will easily saturate usb 2.0 bandwidth although in comparison to a fast hdd or an ssd it is pretty slow and ready boost is useless anyway.

I'd strongly recommend upgrading ram at the minute while its cheap, my 8gb DDR3 crucial memory only cost me £35 and combined with the £115 120gb Agility 3 i got, I now have a very fast system