Which Memory Card Type For Vista's Ready Boost?

Hey All,

I Have been reading for a few days now trying to figure out which Flash memory Card is the best/fastest for use with Windows Vista's Ready Boost.

I have the Toshiba A135-S4427 Laptop, and I am going to be upgrading to 2GB of RAM, and I am going to purchase a 4GB Flash Memory Card for Ready Boost.

I was going to Purchase a USB Flash Drive as they are cheap, but I later decided that Since this laptop has a built in 5-in-1 Memory Card reader, It'd be worth spending the little extra to get a Memory Card that wont stick out of the slot and be in the way as a USB Flash Drive would.

So My Question that I am having a hard time answering is... Which Memory Card type is the Best/Fastest for use with Ready Boost?

SD, xD, CF? This will be being used soly for ReadyBoost.. Right Now I only use SD cards as all my Electronics (Digital Camera, Camcorder) both use SD Card.

Thanks for the Input.

-TheChad

 

I wouldn't recommend getting anything for ReadyBoost if you upgrade to 2GB of RAM. The flash card doesn't act like more RAM. It basically takes the place of your hard drive for caching when no RAM is available. With 2GB, you will probably never run into this situation, and if/when you do, you'll be able to get a memory card at that point and it will be much cheaper.

But again, READYBOOST DOES NOT ACT AS RAM. It will not be as fast in either case. But comparing the different formats is hard anyway as R/W rates can vary from one SD card to another, on CF to another and so forth. So personally, I would recommend a good SD card due to it's form factor and low cost. But like I said, I don't recommend it for ReadyBoost; it will be wasted.

 

Great. but can someone answer the same question for me who has 1 gig of ram? I heard that the SD cards when in use, creates some static noise when throught the soundcard.....So bad some poeple actually took their SD card out. Is there a way to stop this? And does it happen with the xD, Cf or MMS cards too???????

 

Ready boost is mostly used for paging files since technically hard drives are slower than memory paging. Vista w/ 2gb is ideal and x32 OS can't use more than 3gb of memory. Vista x64 can use 4gb of memory. So to answer your question, it wouldn't hurt to use your memory card for ReadyBoost but be warned that it will use some juice just to power it so your battery might deplete faster but then probably by a miniscule amount. I have had no a problem with sound and Readyboost. Oh btw don't forget to take out the card when you finish using your laptop might accidentally lay it down on the SD card side

 

why would it use power ? flash I thought needs no power to hold its content unlike DRAM. It is a write through cache so would use a little bit more power when writing(both flash and HDD) but the extra power used would be more than offseted by cache hit on read as no disk access is needed.

So readyboost would save a bit of power in general usage.

 

oh yeah? what about the energy used by all those cpu cycles to encrypt and compress the data that gets written to the flash drives? then all those cpu cycles used to decrypt and decompress data when the cache on the flash drive take a hit?

 

I have no idea what encryption and compression Microsoft use but the two most common one(zlib for compression, RC4 for encryption which Microsoft use a lot) are very CPU efficient, I can do these two on my WRT54G router(125Mhz MIPS) without sweating(2 sessions of openvpn, with a load average of 0.1 or so).

 

ah, but the point is, the data is no longer dma. and if its dma it has to write to ram first.
its best if some one actually test it out and how much less battery they get compared to without the flash. It feels like we're both guessing.

 

lose you about DMA.

this thread seems to suggest at least in DVD play back, it save battery usage

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=129818

though saving for HD should be smaller(if any) as HD is not as power hungry as DVD. The idea however would be the same, flash use much less energy than HD/DVD(motor) so if the hit rate is high(with a favorable read/write ratio), there should be power saving.

 

By battery depletion I meant by powering the SD reader. It's always active once a card is in place.

 

There is power saving feature for this type of thing(as they are designed for not just PC but PDA or even cell phone), such as :

http://www.ricoh.com/LSI/product_pcif/pcc/5c853/index.html

And even if it does consume some power(of course it would), it is kind of neglible in the context of PC, especially there can be power saving offsetting it.

 

what is the fastest USB flash drive available at the moment?

i'm thinking of getting the sandisk titanium usb - 15mb/s read and 9mb/s write speed! can i get a faster one!

i have 2gb ram and i've recently started usin readyboost (currently usin a 1gb sandisk cruzer, the multi coloured usb) after already having tweaked my comp a lot. i've noticed a difference esp. in the speed in which applications load, and for some reason it reduced boot time by 10 secs!!

 

The Buffalo Firestix USB 2.0 4GB is the fastest one I know. Reads at about 26mb/s and writes at 20mb/s.

Freecom USB-Stick Pro 2 GB
Memorex M-Flyer 2 GB
Kingston Data Traveler II Plus

are also fast. About 18-20mb/s reading and 15mb/s writing.