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    Whats turbo memory

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by TaiLzx, Jul 30, 2008.

  1. TaiLzx

    TaiLzx Notebook Guru

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    What is turbo memory and how do I know if my laptop uses it or not?
     
    TaiLzx, Jul 30, 2008
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  2. Greg

    Greg Notebook Nobel Laureate

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    Turbo memory is a useless feature that is supposed to speed up a Vista PC, but in all reality does nothing useful.
     
    Greg, Jul 30, 2008
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  3. paper_wastage

    paper_wastage Beat this 7x7x7 Cube

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    it does speed up the boot-up of a PC.. but if u cant wait the extra minute.... sigh
     
    paper_wastage, Jul 30, 2008
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  4. Bog

    Bog Losing it...

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    Yeah, Greg is right.

    Robson memory hasn't yielded any real-world or even any benchmark performance gains; consider the transfer of data between your RAM and hard drive to be analogous to a line of men passing buckets to put out a fire.

    The RAM is clearly faster than the slow hard drive; but why the hell would you introduce another man into the line, one who is much slower than the RAM and faster than the HD? You won't pass the buckets along any faster than before; if anything you introduce the latency of flash memory in to the delay time for the bucket to get from A to B. Robson memory doesn't actually make any sense in "increasing performance".
     
    Bog, Jul 30, 2008
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  5. Duct Tape Dude

    Duct Tape Dude Duct Tape Dude

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    For me it enables a hybrid disk power savings sort of thing and does have some impact on battery life. When the HDD is not needed for a bit, the computer will work off of the turbomemory and the HDD actually shuts off. It's dead silent and if it weren't for the LED's and active screen you'd think the computer was off. I haven't benchmarked it but I'd estimate I'm saving a dozen or two minutes on battery life while killing my hdd a little faster (more start/stops).

    Startup time is slightly shorter with it enabled, too.
     
    Duct Tape Dude, Jul 30, 2008
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  6. TaiLzx

    TaiLzx Notebook Guru

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    Is it an option to enable/disable it?
     
    TaiLzx, Jul 30, 2008
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  7. Duct Tape Dude

    Duct Tape Dude Duct Tape Dude

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    Yeah there are two components you can enable/disable in a small application from Intel- ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive. ReadyDrive is the more important part, really-- it gives 384MB of NV cache to your HDD. Readyboost is 512MB so it's kind of pointless (though really fast).

    If worse comes to worse, you can diable everything and go to the disk manager in Vista/XP and make it an internal 1GB flash drive (45MB/s read/write speeds).
     
    Duct Tape Dude, Jul 30, 2008
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