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    Readyboost - useful in my case?

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by frenchglen, Oct 17, 2009.

  1. frenchglen

    frenchglen Notebook Geek

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    Ok so you can see my specs in my signature. I just upgraded to Win7 x64.

    I've read that readyboost doesn't make much difference if you've already got lots of RAM.

    But what about my case: I'm an extremely heavy user with tons of different programs and 100 firefox tabs (and extensions) running at once, 24/7. The RAM very often gets chewed up from all the things I'm thrashing my system with (audio production and imaging programs included). I get a huge pagefile.sys. My drives are 5400 RPM.

    So I'm wondering if slapping in a 16GB SDHC Class 4/6 card and using it as readyboost will make a difference in these situations? Also, if it does, would class 6 make much difference (over class 4) in performance of the caching?

    Thanks for your insight.
     
    frenchglen, Oct 17, 2009
    #1
  2. namaiki

    namaiki "basically rocks" Super Moderator

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    Minimal difference, if any, and increased CPU usage generally, because of the internal card reader interface access.
     
    namaiki, Oct 17, 2009
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  3. Bog

    Bog Losing it...

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    Unless you actually run out of RAM completely, Readyboost is useless.
     
    Bog, Oct 18, 2009
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  4. DarkSilver

    DarkSilver MSI Afterburner

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    Yea! ReadyBoost is useless!
    I even disable the start-up service of ReadyBoost. LOL.
     
    DarkSilver, Oct 18, 2009
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  5. Amnesiac

    Amnesiac 404

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    Agreed. Readyboost is pretty much useless to any one with over 1GB of RAM. Even if the card was being used, it would be worse than pagefile.sys, as flash cards and USB devices generally have a lower speed than the hard drive itself. If you were to get an SSD, then pagefile.sys would be a lot faster.
     
    Amnesiac, Oct 18, 2009
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  6. swarmer

    swarmer beep beep

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    Windows 7's Readyboost is supposedly much better than Vista's.

    But... as I understand it, it's just a cache for frequently-accessed files. So it may speed up app launch time and time to access some files... but if the problem is that it's swapping due to maxed out RAM, then it may not help much.

    Go into Task Manager and look at your RAM usage (the graph) during heavy load. Check the per-process memory usage too. The 'fox can eat RAM like crazy.

    Look at your CPU usage too. Sometimes some web page has some javascript that causes Firefox to eat CPU like crazy.

    Also, run HD Tune to gauge your disk performance... not all 5400 drives are created equal.

    Oh yeah... how are you using your dual hard drive setup right now?
     
    swarmer, Oct 18, 2009
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  7. Amnesiac

    Amnesiac 404

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    Me? Well I have W7 on one and Vista on the other.
     
    Amnesiac, Oct 28, 2009
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  8. Bog

    Bog Losing it...

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    As long as you have enough RAM, Readyboost is useless. It doesn't matter how efficient it is; the technology was developed along the premise that RAM prices would be high in the future.
     
    Bog, Oct 28, 2009
    #8