Proper procedure to remove a ReadyBoost USB stick in Win8.1?

[VirtualLarry]

I have a laptop, with one USB2.0 port, and one USB3.0 port. I have a Logitech Unifying receiver in the USB2.0 port, and a 16GB Sandisk Cruiser Fit USB2.0 drive in the USB3.0 port. The 16GB USB flash drive is being used as a ReadyBoost cache, because the laptop only has 4GB of RAM.

I needed to plug in an external HDD, so I had to remove the 16GB USB flash drive. What I did was, go to the drive, click Properties, click ReadyBoost tab, change the radio selection to "Do not use this device for ReadyBoost". Then it showed a dialog, configuring ReadyBoost cache, and then I went to Safely Remove Hardware, and ejected the USB2.0 flash drive.

I was afraid to just pull it out, in case it would BlueScreen.

Then I plugged in an external HDD, used it, then removed it.

Then to plug in the ReadyBoost drive, I had to plug in the flash drive, right-click the drive letter, click Properties, click ReadyBoost, and select "Use this device for ReadyBoost". Then it said configuring ReadyBoost, and then I was good to go again.

Seems like a lot of steps.

 

[postmortemIA]

yeah, it is not going to BSOD, ReadyBost does not replace RAM, it adds extra pagefile to the USB as it has lower latency than a spindle drive.

do you really think everybody re-configures the USB stick to do this everytime

 

[VirtualLarry]

do you really think everybody re-configures the USB stick to do this everytime

Well, when I first went to just eject it (of which, there is no "Eject" option for right-clicking the drive in Win8.1, you have to navigate to the Safely Remove Hardware icon in systray), it said that it was in use and that I would lose data if I told it to continue and eject it.

 

[bbhaag]

Well, when I first went to just eject it (of which, there is no "Eject" option for right-clicking the drive in Win8.1, you have to navigate to the Safely Remove Hardware icon in systray), it said that it was in use and that I would lose data if I told it to continue and eject it.

Are you sure you didn't just miss it? I have the right click eject option on my system.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I might be confusing things. There might have been an "Eject" for the flash drive, but there definitely was not one for the USB external HDDs.

 

[bbhaag]

That makes more sense. My external drive has to be ejected through the system tray as well. I guess I misread your posts. sorry:$

 

[Matt1970]

When did 4 gigs of ram become small? I don't think you are getting much if any performance boost using ReadyBoost.

 

[VirtualLarry]

When did 4 gigs of ram become small? I don't think you are getting much if any performance boost using ReadyBoost.

You don't think readyboost would speed up paging, given that it has a 5400 RPM HDD?

4GB of RAM is very small. 8GB is normal, and 16GB is large.

 

[code65536]

Uh, guys? ReadyBoost isn't a page file; it's a disk cache.

RB is different from Intel's SRT, Seagate's hybrid drives, or Apple's Fusion drive in that RB is a read cache, not a read/write cache. That's because with RB, you're dealing with flash drives, not SSDs, and, well, flash drives suck with writes, especially once they've been filled (simple controllers with no garbage collection, no TRIM, and little or no parallelism). I've got a cheap flash drive that I like to use for OS installation: it's got really good random read performance and can install an OS much faster than from a DVD. But man, transferring a new ISO image onto that thing is slow as molasses.

As it's a read-only cache, RB is actually powered by Superfetch. Windows determines what files you access frequently and loads those files onto the RB drive (with encryption), and when you request that file, it gets read from RB. Basically, it's just an extension of Superfetch except 1) it's using a flash drive instead of your RAM (slower, but more cache capacity) and 2) it persists across reboots.

Now, since this is just a read cache and not a write cache (writes go straight to your HDD, since more likely than not, your HDD will be just as good as--if not better than--a flash drive when it comes to writes), you can yank the drive at any time with no consequence, and subsequent reads will just come from the original file on the hard drive instead.

As for performance... on the face of it, RB is obviously slower than using RAM as a cache, but it's a lot cheaper to increase your disk cache by 16GB via RB than to do it by adding 16GB of RAM. Its ability to persist can also make it more useful than RAM-based SF, which needs to reload that data from the HDD each time you boot.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Uh, guys? ReadyBoost isn't a page file; it's a disk cache.

RB is different from Intel's SRT, Seagate's hybrid drives, or Apple's Fusion drive in that RB is a read cache, not a read/write cache. That's because with RB, you're dealing with flash drives, not SSDs, and, well, flash drives suck with writes, especially once they've been filled (simple controllers with no garbage collection, no TRIM, and little or no parallelism). I've got a cheap flash drive that I like to use for OS installation: it's got really good random read performance and can install an OS much faster than from a DVD. But man, transferring a new ISO image onto that thing is slow as molasses.

As it's a read-only cache, RB is actually powered by Superfetch. Windows determines what files you access frequently and loads those files onto the RB drive (with encryption), and when you request that file, it gets read from RB. Basically, it's just an extension of Superfetch except 1) it's using a flash drive instead of your RAM (slower, but more cache capacity) and 2) it persists across reboots.

Now, since this is just a read cache and not a write cache (writes go straight to your HDD, since more likely than not, your HDD will be just as good as--if not better than--a flash drive when it comes to writes), you can yank the drive at any time with no consequence, and subsequent reads will just come from the original file on the hard drive instead.

As for performance... on the face of it, RB is obviously slower than using RAM as a cache, but it's a lot cheaper to increase your disk cache by 16GB via RB than to do it by adding 16GB of RAM. Its ability to persist can also make it more useful than RAM-based SF, which needs to reload that data from the HDD each time you boot.

Interesting perspective. My understanding was that RB was a cache for the pagefile *only*, and had nothing to do with SF. Basically, it eliminates the seek time for paging.

Edit: If it were as you say, why does Windows recommend a size for the RB file roughly equal to the amount of RAM in the machine, and not by default utilize the entire drive?

 

[code65536]

Interesting perspective. My understanding was that RB was a cache for the pagefile *only*, and had nothing to do with SF. Basically, it eliminates the seek time for paging.

Edit: If it were as you say, why does Windows recommend a size for the RB file roughly equal to the amount of RAM in the machine, and not by default utilize the entire drive?

It's an extension of Superfetch. It's implemented within the Superfetch service (so if you disable SF, you also disable RB)... and also Microsoft's own documentation says so.

As for why it defaults to that... I guess if they don't want to eat up the entire drive (why not? my guess would be that since RB is shown as an option every time a compatible flash drive is inserted, there may be people who end up turning it on without knowing what they're doing, in which case, they probably would not appreciate their shiny new flash drive suddenly becoming all full), then they'll have to come up with some sort of default value, and... well, what value would you use? Using the RAM size is better than pulling a random number out of thin air. *shrugs*

 

[Matt1970]

You don't think readyboost would speed up paging, given that it has a 5400 RPM HDD?

4GB of RAM is very small. 8GB is normal, and 16GB is large.

We will just agree to disagree with the ram size, but like someone just mentioned it's an extension of SuperFetch. SuperFetch is normally loaded into ram so having it go to your flash drive can actually degrade performance.

 

[Gunbuster]

So to conclude this thread:

Proper procedure: Pull out USB stick.

 

[code65536]

Edit: If it were as you say, why does Windows recommend a size for the RB file roughly equal to the amount of RAM in the machine, and not by default utilize the entire drive?

On second thought, this is probably just coincidence. The maximum file size in FAT32 is 4GB, which sets a limit for RB (I think you can go higher if you format the drive using NTFS). And your system just happens to have 4GB of RAM...