ReadyBoost : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

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.

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 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.

A good ReadyBoost flash drive will have high capacity and fast transfer rate. It does 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. The 8 GB SanDisk Extreme Countour (25 MB/second read, 18 MB/second write), with AES encryption, costs $70.00 USD Last revised/verified: 2009-08-06 . The Kingston 8 GB drive (20 MB/second Read, 10 MB/second Write) costs $74.00 CAD . Many models describe themselves as optimised for ReadyBoost without giving specific figures. The reason flash drives are faster than hard disks is not a higher transfer rate, but 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. A vanilla 16 GB flash drive will cost about$70.00 USD

16 GB of regular RAM would cost about$560.00 USD , if your motherboard had room for it.

On 2009-04-22 I bought a SanDisk Cruzer Micro thumbdrive 8 GB drive for $40.00 CAD . It comes with U3 firmware to let you place U3-compatible applications on it and move them from machine to machine. It appears as two drives O: and P:. O: is read-write where you stor your files. P: read-only containing some programs. It uses a maximum of 4 GB for ReadyBoost caching with write caching enabled. The other 4 GB I use as a fast backup drive. Optionally I could password protect the files stored on it. If you lose the password, you lose the files. I previously used a 2 GB AU _USB20 freebie from Corel, now on the laptop.