How to get a speed reading on your flash drive using Vista

[Deleted member 4644]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=186

 

[loup garou]

Hey, thanks, never knew that. I gotta say, Vista's event viewer is just great.

 

[imported_boe]

Anyone here actually using readyboost? Any good comparison results in performance? My system already has 2GB of RAM so I'm not sure how much it could do for me as I've never exceeded 1.5 GB of actual memory in running programs. Also Could I use the thumb drive as my swap file?

Any good articles on setting it up?

Thanks

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: boe
Anyone here actually using readyboost? Any good comparison results in performance? My system already has 2GB of RAM so I'm not sure how much it could do for me as I've never exceeded 1.5 GB of actual memory in running programs. Also Could I use the thumb drive as my swap file?

Any good articles on setting it up?

Thanks

It makes a very noticeable difference on my system (switching in/out of games is where you really see it); I only have 1GB of RAM so that's probably part of it. The other part is that I bought a really fast flash drive (actually the 2GB model of the Apacer mentioned in the above-linked article), random read/write speeds are nearly 10MB/sec.

There's another thread in here that provides quite a bit more detail about ReadyBoost, but it isn't something you'd just put your swap file on - it uses a flash drive as an intermediate cache for smaller random file accesses (for which a hard drive is pretty slow, mine is 0.5MB/sec). However if you have 2GB of RAM I don't think it would make nearly as much of a difference.

 

[oldman420]

I went to microcenter yesterday and they did not even have a capable drive as of yet.
there was linkage in a previus post that indicated the ready boost, esp with a 4 gig flash drive did help apps load way quicker..
IMO most apps load so quick it is silly to spend 100 + bucks to shave a second or two off that time.
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=6

 

[imported_boe]

Thanks for the info. I guess where I'd like to see the most inprovement is in the boot process - I get into Windows reasonably quickly but dang if it doesn't take a long time to load antivirus, etc...

I appreciate the feedback and would definitely like to hear from someone who compared the difference if you already have 2gb.

Thanks again.

 

[InlineFive]

Originally posted by: oldman420
I went to microcenter yesterday and they did not even have a capable drive as of yet.
there was linkage in a previus post that indicated the ready boost, esp with a 4 gig flash drive did help apps load way quicker..
IMO most apps load so quick it is silly to spend 100 + bucks to shave a second or two off that time.
http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=6

You shouldn't need that much flash except in special circumstances. You can buy a 1GB TurboFlash USB stick on NewEgg for $19.99. For that price it doesn't hurt.