Comments on: Does ReadyBoost Really Boost System Performance For Windows Vista or Windows 7?

By: Ron Schenone

Ron Schenone — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:39:10 +0000

You can format the USB

By: Kandy

Kandy — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:32:31 +0000

Well, the fact is that ready boost works well with most computer and laptop harddrives but, i have been wanting to remove it from my USB and i cant do it. Can anyone tell me how to remove it.

By: BudBux

BudBux — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 02:00:31 +0000

- Enclosure drives aren’t just closer to, they are hard drives (traditional mechanical hard disk drives).

- ReadyBoost CAN’T be used (and it is automatically disabled) with mechanical drives, because… well… there are no benefits of it. ReadyBoost gets benefits from RANDOM (not sequential) seek times. Mechanical drives are actually SLOWER than flash drives in random access operations.

More info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readyboost

By: Bonjo

Bonjo — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:38:57 +0000

have anyone consider using 2.5 enclosure drive instead of SD/flash?

2.5 inch drive are suppose to be closer to hard drive speed.

By: Ron Schenone

Ron Schenone — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:00:02 +0000

Thanks for the comments.

tdietert – thanks for sharing your experience with us.

By: tdietert

tdietert — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:44:54 +0000

I just bought a 8gb 200x high speed flash drive, both because of its shock absorbing characteristics, and because of its possible benefits in ReadyBoost. On my centrino core 2 duo laptop with already 3 gb, I have noticed a difference in speed. Also, the light on the flash drive does blink randomly, making me think that somehow something is happening that is an advantage. Since I was buying a new flash drive anyway, I decided to get any advantages ReadyBoost would deliver.

By: BudBux

BudBux — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:00:03 +0000

Yeah, tblount, but… there are two aspects you didn’t recognize (despite you obviously don’t understand what cacheing is).

First, an ReadyBoost device doesn’t *replace* a hard disk nor it is “inserted between your memory and your hard drive”. Both are running *at the same time* (parallel data access) helping each other and a whole system to achieve better performance.

Second, a hard disk has a huge advantage in *sequential* read/write only (at least before USB 3.0 devices are used), but big performance drop in *random* read/write. An USB memory (as any RAM memory) has no mechanical heads to position and virtually no seek time thus random access isn’t slower than sequential access. So, there’s no point to compare them in sequential access only. If you compare their random access times, you would see that USB memory is almost 100 times faster than mechanical hard drive. Cache algorithms are taking care of those speed benefits and ‘know’ exactly what type of data to precache to a ReadyBoost device.

Sorry for any errors, English isn’t my native language.

By: tblount

tblount — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:57:12 +0000

Consider this… if you average the read and the write speeds of a USB flash drive, it will be around 15 mb/s. When you average the read and write speeds of an SATA hard drive, it will be around 70 (to 100) mb/s. Tell me how inserting a device running 6 to 8 times SLOWER than your hard drive – between your memory and your hard drive – can speed up the computer? I don’t think it does.

Test this yourself: Type and enter: “winsat disk -seq -read -drive c” (and you will get a report on your hard drive read speed.

Repace -read with -write and get a report on your hard drive write speed. Now run those same commands and replace C with the drive letter of your USB device.

What do you conclude?