Vista Readyboost with a SD card

Hi, there,

Has anyone out there managed to get "readyboost" to work on an HP laptop running Vista business x64 with an SD card?

I have been running 4GB USB SanDisk for my 8510w running vista64 since a couple months ago, and it does improve the performance a lot. However, it is not so easy on the go for a laptop, so I did try to replace such readyboost with all my SD Cards (SanDisk II, Kingston, etc) and it reports that all cards are too slow - even I tried to format them with FAT32 but remain same, as well as to update the Reader's driver to most updated one.

Thanks in advance

 

i'm running ready boost with a 4gb 20mbs class 6 sd card.

 

My both SanDisk Ultra II & Kingston SDHC cards are all in class 4. Should I have to buy class 6 one?

 

I have tried it on ad off for sometime now, with poor results using many different class 6 cards, until recently (January), when I went to a 16GB Sandisk Extreme III card (mucho expensive).


Of course, your biggeest bang for the buck is to buy "real ram". If I thought mine would accept more than 4gb RAM, I would buy the modules in a heartbeat!

My main reason for adding a high speed, large capacity SD card was to have a second backup area available for a small amount of data (approx 8 to 12 GB of total data), since I am backing up 100MB or less very often.


While in the HP card port, its does not operate anywhere close to the speed it should (compared to using a USB memory reader designed for the Extreme Card), it does do readyboost very well, and copying files to the excess storage space on the card often goes faster than using wireless N.


I will quickly mention a couple things:


1) I have 4gb of RAM, so the readyboost advantage is supposed to very minimal (if at all).


2) I use VMWare Workstation, and run everything in VM's, so my experience is based on copying files in and out of a VM, to and from the card, and to and from the network (with another HP DV9500 on the other end - but not a VM on the other side). I am told that the VM overhead is something like one or two percent (but I think it can be much more when talking about processing huge (multigigs) of data).


3) After adding the Extreme card, my machine seems to be much more reliable. This is exactly opposite of what I experienced using other (slower) cards.


4) The BIOS version can make a big difference in speed.


Here is a comparison:


SDSDX3004GA31 Extreme card

SDSLOT 6.22 WRITE 6.22 READ BIOS F.53

SDSLOT 10.12 WRITE 15.02 READ BIOS F.59

USBREADER 15.00 WRITE 18.20 READ (not optimized for the exteme III card)

SD Card "X" speed rating to mb per second rating:

6x 0.9

32x 4.8

40x 6.0

66x 10.0

100x 15.0

133x 20.0

150x 22.5

200x 30.0


I have had thoughts of trying the cards made by OZC (cheaper, and only a little slower).


Hope this info helps someone!


J

 

thanks a lot, Joe!

I will try class 6 soon!

 

Noob question guys. How does one boot from readyboost?

 

You can use ReadyBoost with slower memory, you just need to tweak the registry a little. Here's an article on how to do it. The article is about USB memory but works with SD cards too.
http://www.windowsvistamagazine.com...ny-usb-stick-to-readyboost-your-computer.html

 

Thanks a lot, BADW0LF!

My SanDisk II 4GB SD card works very well now, and my machine even is doing better than the previous USB 4GB SanDisk Flash!

Enjoying ReadyBoost on the Go!