Readyboost + Corsair Notebook Gaming Memory SODIMM

I'm planning to buy SDHC card 4GB from Transcend of Class 6 and will use fully 4GB as readyboost in my X61 then I will also replace my notebook memory to the corsair memory (for gaming) also up to 4GB.

Do you think it will increase my x61 performance? Currently i'm using Vista, 4GB memory (corsair valueselect) and 500 GB HDD 5400 rpm.

Thanks

 

The 4 GBs will help, but Readyboost is just crap.

 

I'm pretty sure anything over 1gig is useless on readyboost.

 

At 1 GB Readyboost can still be useful. However, at 4GB the performance gains will be minimal at best.

What exact kind of slowdowns are you experiencing now that you think Readyboost might help with??

A better way to increase performance would be to buy a 7200RPM drive or ideally an SSD. However, I realize that your 500GB 5400RPM drive is probably quite new, and you'd rather not replace it (especially with a 64-128GB SSD).

 

minimal at best, does it mean it can actually slow down the performances? I'm looking for a faster booting, I have already eliminated the boot up programs such as security client. I am now thinking to remove also the power manager.

Changing to SSD is very interesting, but I am a very mobile guy and doesn't like to move the files around. I have a very huge file for Outlook datas and a lot of my work datas on the hdd.

The reason why I wanted to put the SDHC card is that I think because one of the writers here in the forum, why shall we leave the slot empty doing nothing, it can be used as a quick storage or readyboost. Well now that I dont need storage, I might use it as readyboost right?

Thanks

 

500 GB SSD is coming? > http://www.tomshardware.com/news/500GB-SSD-CeBIT,7197.html <

it uses SATA2, will it be installable in my X61?

 

I don't think it will slow down performance, but it may make your machine more slugglish for 5-15 minutes after booting. The ReadyBoost cache must be re-populated from your drive after each boot cycle. This is run at a low I/O (same as superfetch), but it can still make the system feel sluggish until the cache is full.

Readyboost is unlikely to improve boot times for the reasons mentioned above. Unlike Turbo Memory, Vista cannot rely on the SD card always being present, and thus the cache is not persistent and cannot be used for improving boot speed.

The main goal of Readyboost is to mitigate the effect of paging to a conventional hard drive, and slightly improve application launch times due to the superior random, but lower sequential, R/W speed of NAND flash. Superfetch does much the same thing, except it uses DRAM that is far faster for both sequential and random R/W.

I use an 8GB SDHC card for storage, but I do NOT use it for ReadyBoost (it actually could hurt performance on a device with a good SSD).

It will work, but it will only operate at SATA I speeds (1.5 Gbps vs. 3 gbps) due to a limitation of the 61 series.

 

wow thanks jonlumpkin for the responses, my outlook data is around 7GB, if I move this to the SDHC card with the capacity of 32 GB, will it improve my outlook start up significantly? Can I use in that 32GB card, 1GB as ready boost then the other 30GB as a storage?

How about the gaming memory from corsair? Do you have any comments? Or is it just a marketing gimmick from Corsair? Thanks again

 

I've never dealt with an Outlook file that large, so I can't comment. I would suggest you try it, and see if if helps. My inclination would be if the outlook file is read in small pieces, it should help; however, if large sequential chunks are read, then an SDHC card would be worse due to the lower sequential speed.


I believe gaming memory to be a marketing gimmick. It only has a potential use if you are going to overclock your CPU and memory bus (NOT recommended). I just buy the cheapest RAM from a reliable brand (Crucial, G-Skill, Kingston, Corsair, Patriot, or OCZ) that matches the system specs (DDR3 1066 on the x200; DDR2 667 on the x61).

 

On second thought if I put my files on the SD card then it can get lost easily so I have remove this option. On the memory, I think my X61 has the FSB of 800, does it mean I can use the gaming memory which I think its actually the PC6400? Thanks

Quote from HWiNFO32:
CPU SLFM (Dynamic FSB): 800.0 MHz = 8.00 x 100.0 MHz @ 0.8500 V

 

I believe the memory controller is locked at 667MHz. You should verify this with someone that has tried to put 800MHz memory into the x61 (I think it would downclock and perform like DDR2 667).

You could set up a synchronize between the SD card and the HDD so that if the SD cards gets lost you aren't down anything.

 

Hitman,

Are you running a 64-bit OS or a 32-bit OS?

I run the 32-bit version of Vista Basic for my OS, and just in case you may not know, Vista 32-bit wont see all of your 4GB RAM. Despite what the System Properties dialogue reports as being 4GB (in Vista SP1), it really can only address a little more than 3GB (there is much literature on the www about this subject). Vista SP1, they basically just made it say you had 4GB installed just to calm down people from thinking something was wrong, but really, the OS can't use it all. On my system (T61p), I only show 3069MB of physical RAM (under performance tab in Task Manager) as what the OS sees. This leaves just under 1 GB of RAM that cannot be addressed since it is 32-bit. SO, on mine, I installed a program utility called RAMdrive which can recognize this unused un-addressable memory, and it can make a RAMdrive which is visible in Disk Management, and you can then format it as NTFS and assign it a drive letter, and point your paging file to it as a very fast RAM drive. Doing this DOES slow startup and shutdown a bit since when you shut down it saves the contents of that RAMdrive to an img file on your HDD, and when it boots, it re-loads that img file to the RAMdrive. Now if you are running 64-bit OS or Windows 2003 server 32-bit (supports 36-bit PAE extensions) then you will be able to natively address all 4GB of RAM w/o having to fuss with the RAMdrive thing.

I also installed an SSD hard drive and that made a huge difference in performance. SLC drives do not suffer the same fragmentation drawbacks as MLC drives have, so make sure you get an SLC drive. Currently, the Samsung SLC 64GB drive is the best bang for your buck. This is the one which I have. I then put my 200GB rotary hard drive installed in a SATA second drive caddy that goes in the UltraBay Slim slot on the side for bulk storage. The OS is installed on the SSD drive and only takes up 25GB of my 64GB size. Once you get an SSD drive though, you can go to the OCZ forums and they have all the registry tweaks that you can do to make your SSD combo perform very well. But just remember, SLC is the only way to go. You don't want long-term problems, just to gain extra size. It's not worth it. Most Thinkpads have UltraBays and you can install big drives there.

But this combo makes for lightning speed

Oh, and by the way, when you have a fast SSD drive with 4GB of RAM, even if you enable Readyboost, it wont make your system any faster since it tests the speed of your HDD fetching and if it's faster than your Readyboost memory, then it wont bother using Readyboost for fetching. I found an article about this somewhere. I will see if I can find it

.

 

Here's the Q&A article describing from an MS engineer about how Readyboost works:

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/readyboost-q-a.aspx

 

Do you know any third party program that can check the clocking speed? I have bought the RAM and the SDHC card, well I saw a little bit increase now when I access my outlook. Thanks

 

Hi Josh,

I travel a lot these days and in the coming future too, moving my files is a bit difficult since I'm very mobile and I need to have my files here. I access a lot with outlook and AutoCADs details drawings.

I think I start the feeling when I hibernate my x61, it starts differently and I have upgraded my RAM. But I am not sure at which PC Speed its running.

Thanks

 

it seems Jon is right, I think I'm still running at 667, can someone confirm it?



thanks