Vista - flash drives as RAM?

Just a quick question, which versions of vista support having flash drives as removable RAM?

 

I think you are talking about Vista readyboost, AFAIK it is available in all versions. But it DOES NOT allow you to add flash memory as RAM. It uses Flash Memory to speedup program loading by using an intelligent file fetching technique, but it is not the same thing as adding more RAM.

 

I agree:

Can you redefine your question a little bit unless we've misunderstood you?

 

ready boost devices (in this case flash drives) does not function like ram. They simply caches the page file. This means that windows will still write to the page file on the hdd, but it will also write to the flash drive. on read back, flash drives are faster than hdd some times 'cos theres virtually no seek time required. All ready boost devices are removable at practically anytime you want. This is allowed because that data is also on the page file on the hdd, so you don't lose any data when u unplug the flash drive.

ready boost devices differ to ram (apart from ram being about 100 times faster than the ready boost devices ) in that with more ram, windows is less and less likely to write to the page file and thus less and less likely to use the ready boost device. vista also prefetches data that you are likely to use next into unused parts of ram through the superfetch scheme (they don't do this for ready boost devices). So if you have alot of ram, theres no need to use a ready boost device since windows is practically not gonna use it anyway so u practically gain no extra performance. usually if u have 2GB of ram, theres no need to use ready boost with vista.

 

i just realized that I have 5 usb ports on my asus a8jp. I plugged in a 1gb flash stick, and turned on readyboost on that. Today I also connected my sony hd 20gb walkman via usb and it gave me the option of turning on readyboost on that too. If I do, do you know of any documented cases wehre it'll dramatically improve system speed? so potentially i'd have all 5 usb ports occupied by usb flash disks for readyboost. right now i have 1gb of stock RAM.

 

I don't think it's necessary to use more than one flash drive for readyboost. One should be fine. I'm not sure what size would be acceptable, probably 1 or 2 gb.

It writes the page file (which is like a cache of commonly run programs) so commonly used programs can load faster since they will load from the flash memory, instead of from the hdd.