ReadyBoost : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

A feature of Vista, W2008, W7-32, W7-64, W8-32, W8-64, W2012, W10-32 and W10-64 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. Main RAM (Random Access Memory) is now so fast, cheap and big. Hard disks have become so fast with large built-in cache RAM. Flash RAM drives, in order to lower prices, have become slower. SSDs (Solid State Disks) are so fast huge and cheap you can put all of your OS (Operating System), programs and active data on one.

ReadyBoost acts like auxiliary RAM 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. In Vista ReadyBoost uses a maximum of 4 GB. The rest of you drive is for files. W7-32 and W7-64 allows up to eight devices for a maximum of 256 GB of additional memory, with up to 32 GB on a single storage device.

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 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.

For ReadyBoost you must use the fastest USB drives, e.g. USB-3. ReadyBoost is somewhete obsolete. You would use an entire SSD (Solid State Disk) instead.