A feature of Vista to use a flash drive you insert into a USB (Universal Serial Bus) port. It is a Mickey Mouse feature that does not work
well for a number of reasons. If you want to improve your disk preformance, get an SSD.
It acts like auxiliary RAM (Random Access Memory) to speed up disk
access. The flash RAM on a flash drive is not nearly as fast as the main system RAM, but it is still 90 times faster than a hard disk for random access, though it is slightly slower for long
sequential accesses. To speed up disk access, Vista puts commonly used small files on the flash drive for rapid
access. The speed up effect is even more pronounced for laptops which have slower hard drives.
In drive properties, you can turn on write caching as well as read caching. This speeds up disks even further,
but it means it becomes unsafe to remove the flash drive at any time. ReadyBoost uses a maximum of 4 GB. The rest of you drive is for files.
Many models describe themselves as optimised for ReadyBoost without giving specific figures. The main reason
flash drives are faster than hard disks is not a higher transfer rate, but that they don’t require time for
seeking to the correct spot.
When you use ReadyBoost, your drive is a lot quieter. It makes fewer seeks, and hence runs cooler and should
last longer, though some say use and heat are not what make modern drives fail. Since the flash drive has no
moving parts, faster, but more reliable than the mechanical disk.
The alternative would be adding RAM to your motherboard for disk caching. 16 GB
of regular RAM would cost about , if your motherboard had room for it.
Tips
- Get one of the fastest USB flash drive models for ReadyBoost. If you get just any one, chances are your
computer will run more slowly with ReadyBoost.
- USB ports come in three speeds, 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0. Ideally your flash drive would support USB 3.0 and you
would plug it into a USB 3.0 port on your computer. It is a waste to plug an 2.0 USB flash drive into a USB 1.0
port on your computer, since it will drag your flash drive down to USB 1.0 level performance.
- A good ReadyBoost flash drive will have high capacity and fast transfer rate. It should not use compression
or encryption which would needlessly slow it down on the cache. Those features apply just to the file storage
part of the drive.
Onions
- Published read/write speeds are all over the map for the same drive. Vendors make preposterous claims. The
problem is there is no official way to measure speed. What can you do? Benchmark them yourself with the same
benchmark software, or file copy test. Or look for models that ranked highly in benchmarks.
- Cheap flash memory for caching is a great idea, but the memory should be permanently installed
inside the computer, where it can’t accidentally be disconnected while it is in use. Further, I
think it should be buried even deeper in an even safer place — inside the hard drive where even the OS (Operating System)
can’t accidentally screw it up. The use of a flash drive for both removable data storage and disk caching
reminds me of Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus of the Pink Panther movies, played by Herbert Lom, who kept a
cigarette lighter that looked identical to his gun in his top left desk drawer.
Products
 | recommend Amazon⇒OCZ ATV 8 GB USB Flash Drive |
| asin: B000XFRTI8 |
| One of the faster drives. A smaller 4 GB model would be suitable for ReadyBoost-only use, though there are negligible cost savings. Get an even bigger model to hold as many files as you need to transport. |
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