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    Vista's Memory Booster

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Mayo =P, Jan 17, 2008.

  1. Mayo =P

    Mayo =P Newbie

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    I heard about memory booster in Vista (my friend also tried this), and if you put a flash drive, it will store some cache to make you computer run faster. How much exactly does the memory booster feature use in the flash drive? Ex. how much memory will it take from 2GB flash drive?
     
    Mayo =P, Jan 17, 2008
    #1
  2. Lithus

    Lithus NBR Janitor

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    It'll take as much as you want it to take. But it doesn't work too well, if at all.
     
    Lithus, Jan 17, 2008
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  3. klutchrider

    klutchrider Notebook Evangelist

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    Max is 4GB, but I like it, to me I see a slight increase in performance.
     
    klutchrider, Jan 17, 2008
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  4. Soulburner

    Soulburner Notebook Evangelist

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    It's much slower than current RAM and since its connected through the Universal Serial Bus, even slower than a HDD. It really isn't much help.
     
    Soulburner, Jan 17, 2008
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  5. Philio

    Philio Notebook Guru

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    I think this statement is a bit inaccurate.

    USB 2 = 480MBit/sec = 60MBytes/sec

    A hard drive would probably achieve close to this if reading/writing continuously but random read/write is much slower.

    I'm not sure how fast a USB 2 flash drive would actually perform, but you would assume it would be quicker for random read/writes as there are no moving parts.
     
    Philio, Jan 18, 2008
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  6. goofball

    goofball Notebook Deity

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    That's max throughput for usb 2.0, and no flash drive will do that in terms of read/write. It's just not 100% available, there's too much overhead to get 60MB/sec across USB.
    You are better off maxing out your RAM instead of spending on a flash drive to boost performance.
     
    goofball, Jan 18, 2008
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  7. Lithus

    Lithus NBR Janitor

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    The reason flash memory is used is because of the incredibly fast access times compared to an HDD. Readyboost is a great idea in theory, but so far, gains have been minimal. A larger equivalent is SSD's, which cause a very noticeable improvement.
     
    Lithus, Jan 18, 2008
    #7