SSD and ReadyBoost, is there a point to have both?

Pretty much thread title. If you have an SSD drive, is ReadyBoost going to give you any gains whatsoever?

 

According to your signature you have 4GB of RAM, which means there's already very little reason to use Readyboost...

 

I agree. Even at 2GB there is little reason. At 4GB there is almost no reason to use ReadyBoost.

 

Use readyboost only when you are doing extreme tasks like rendering things but it doesn't help much but it helps a little bit.

 

actualy it makes prefetch use the readyboost cache instead of the ram and free some 300mb of ram in my 64 bit system

but you need to have a fast sd card or usb key because i had a class 2 sd card as ready boost host and it slowed my boot time (yes ready boost cache is rebuilt during boot time) and my aplication start time since the transfer rate was way slower i switched to a class 10 sd card and it's day and night

i'm gonna test intel turbo memory too soon to see if it's faster then this

 

I had intel turbo memory in my Sager Laptop. It was only 1GB but I could tell a difference when it stopped working correctly. I'll be getting a 16GB class 10 card when my MR04R finally makes it here.

ReadyBoost definitely works... the people who say it doesn't must be using slow cards. I'm just curious if it would still help when used with an SSD drive. I imagine not.

 

actualy intel turbo memory use ready drive not ready boost (well the 1gb module use 512 for ready drive and 512 for ready boost) but i got the 4gb module wich is only ready drive so i wait and see


i don't know if having a ssd disable anything i don't have one

 

If I remember correctly Windows 7 will disable disk defragmentation, Superfetch, ReadyB, boot and app prefetching

 

Readyboost is available for flash devices(USB stick), but not for SSDs. Superfetch service is automatically started and running.
Defrag task is planned for every Wednesday 01.00 h, the SSD partitions are marked "don't defragment".
The registry contains 0x00000003 for EnablePrefetcher and EnableSuperfetch, as of my knowledge this means enable them.
This information was gathered from a clean installed Win7 Prof X64 on a Samsung SSD with trim enabled.

 

Superfetch and prefetch by default was enabled on mine. There is an ongoing argument as to their need/use on an SSD system.

RB is a waiste on a SSD system. 99.9% of the time the SSD is faster than your RB drive. This both in transfer rate and access time. RB mainly caches small files that the OS knows with the low access times of your HDD IOPS is minimal. most RB drives will have an access of 0.2 or lower ms making these IOPS much faster even though the USB interface bandwidth is much lower than the HDD's.

 

more information from msdn blog...

SSD and Windows 7

According to the Microsoft blog linked to below, when an SSD is recognized scheduled Defrag will be disabled, as will Superfetch, prefetch, and ReadyBoost. I have an Intel SSD Gen.2 installed with Windows 7 x64 and all of those things are not disabled except for ReadyBoost. Why didn't Windows 7 turn off what the article states should be turned off? Is this a case of my SSD not being recognized or a bug in Windows 7?

Will disk defragmentation be disabled by default on SSDs?

Yes. The automatic scheduling of defragmentation will exclude partitions on devices that declare themselves as SSDs. Additionally, if the system disk has random read performance characteristics above the threshold of 8 MB/sec, then it too will be excluded. The threshold was determined by internal analysis.

The random read threshold test was added to the final product to address the fact that few SSDs on the market today properly identify themselves as SSDs. 8 MB/sec is a relatively conservative rate. While none of our tested HDDs could approach 8 MB/sec, all of our tested SSDs exceeded that threshold. SSD performance ranged between 11 MB/sec and 130 MB/sec. Of the 182 HDDs tested, only 6 configurations managed to exceed 2 MB/sec on our random read test. The other 176 ranged between 0.8 MB/sec and 1.6 MB/sec.

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.

Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives - Engineering Windows 7 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs