ReadyBoost: Helpful or Not?

[Jason Dunn]

ReadyBoost is one of those interesting Vista technologies that sounds amazingly cool on paper, but out in the real world it's harder to figure out if it's really helpful or not. <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/31/windows-vista-superfetch-and-readyboostanalyzed/page6.html">This article over at Tom's Hardware Guide</a> is one of the mot authoritative I've read on the subject, and their results show that if you have a system with only 512 MB of RAM, it can benefit significantly from the addition of a 2 GB ReadyBoost flash drive. But if you have 2 GB of RAM in a system, the benefits are much less.<br /><br />I was benchmarking a new system I'm building (review forthcoming) and using PC Mark 2005, it benchmarked in at a score of <b>7106</b>. I rant the same test again, only this time with a 2 GB Sandisk USB Flash drive acting in ReadyBoost capacity, and the score jumped up to <b>7455</b>. That's a 5% jump in performance, and while 5% might not seem like much, PC performance enthusiasts will go to great lengths to squeeze out an extra 5% performance bump. I ran it again and got a score of <b>7649</b>, which is 8% above the original score. A third run turned up a score of <b>7541</b>, a 6% boost over the original score - giving us an average performance boost of 6.3%. Not too shabby, especially since USB Flash drives are plentiful.<br /><br />What's your experience been with ReadyBoost? Have you done any testing and seen performance improvements?

[Kris Kumar]

I received my new work laptop with only 512MB RAM and Vista would run but it got slow once I was running a couple of apps. I plugged in a Kingston 1GB USB stick and allocated 512MB for ReadyBoost. The stick was even marked as ReadyBoost compatible. I don't think it helped. The laptop was still un-usable. I didn't even bother to run any tests.

Now that I have 2.5GB on my laptop I haven't bothered to try it out. Wonder if ReadyBoost works well when the system has a decent spec vs. when it has shabby specs?

Curious to hear about others' experiences.

[ctmagnus]

I use the CPU Utilization gadget in the sidebar, and I don't think I've seen my memory go above 60% utilization. I have 2GB. I've tried ReadyBoost a couple of times, but for me it's one of those things that it's nice to know it's there for if I ever need it, even though I don't need it now.

[Mike Temporale]

It really depends on what you're doing with said system. I'm running a lot of virtual machines which in turn means a lot of hard disk access. Since ReadyBoost caches reads/writes to the hard drive, I've found it made a huge difference on my machine. Especially when I'm running more than a couple VPCs. I've got 4GB of RAM and a 4GB ReadyBoost. I sure notice the difference under heavy drive access. However, under normal use, not so much.

[Phronetix]

Hmmm. I guess the 6% means something. But to me it means that I am not willing to have a USB key sticking out of the side of my laptop just to get a hair better performance.

Seriously though, I mean if someone proved I could get 6% better power from my vehicle by hanging a flag from my aerial, you know... I hate to say it, but I'd happily sacrifice the gain.

That is just me.

[Jason Dunn]

But to me it means that I am not willing to have a USB key sticking out of the side of my laptop just to get a hair better performance.

Yeah, I agree on a laptop it would be a hassle, but on a desktop PC, not so much...(which is where I tested it).

[Doug Johnson]

I ran with ReadyBoost on my Dell Inspiron E1705 for a while using a 2GB high speed SD card, and well, I didn't notice any speed improvements. But FireWire video capture and playback stopped working. Turns out on this particular machine the SD card slot and the FireWire port use the same bus, and having an SD card inserted while trying to do anything with FireWire can cause some real problems. So I don't use ReadyBoost any longer. Considering the machine has 2GB of RAM to start with I don't think I'm missing anything.

[Silver]

I have the exact same Dell laptop and the exact same problem - whenever I was transferring video via Firewire (with a SD card for Readyboost) I would ALWAYS get choppy video on my machine.

So now I always just pop out the SD card before capturing any video and it's always perfect.

Overall though - I DO notice a difference with Readyboost on (especially when loading up apps throughout the day).