SanDisk Cruzer® Micro USB ReadyBoost Flash Drives

[lazarus000]

thought it was good for those needing thumbs that were labeled for Readyboost.

2GB- $19.99


4GB - $34.99

note that if you apply for a radioshack mastercard you can get another $5 off the 4GB thumb drive.

$5 mastercard MIR

 

[zetsway]

Does this actually work? Anyone had any experience?

 

[Borg20001]

Originally posted by: zetsway
Does this actually work? Anyone had any experience?

I think this only works if you have a Vista machine. I'm still using WinXP.

 

[zetsway]

Me too!

 

[lazarus000]

ReadyBoost is a Vista only feature ....... as far as i know

 

[kzrssk]

It's still a good drive for a cheap price. I saw these at Staples for the same price.

 

[Staples]

I just bought the 4GB one at Costco today. It is marked at $35 and they have a $7 off coupon in their coupon book.

 

[xchangx]

Can you format this and then will it work with XP? Or is it just the Readyboost that only works with XP?

 

[PolymerTim]

It will work like a regular USB stick; it is just designed to work well with Vista ReadyBoost. ReadyBoost requires fast access times which, until recently weren't an important feature for most users of USB sticks, so even some of the nicer ones don't always qualify for use with ReadyBoost. I think for this purpose though, you can find very cheap sticks that still qualify. For instance at newegg right now, the 4GB ReadyBoost sticks start at $22 while the 2GB is going for $13. USB flash memory prices have plummeted lately so everyone thinks they're getting a great deal, but if you look around you can find it pretty cheap everywhere.

 

[dehemke]

Readyboost provides very little real performance increase, and those results decrease with the amount of real system ram in the machine.

anandtech's benchmarking found only significant improvement with large readyboost drives and 512MB of system ram.

"ReadyBoost makes a very significant impact on performance here [512 MB of RAM and 4GB ReadyBoost]. With 4GB of flash dedicated to ReadyBoost, we saw an increase in performance of over 47%. However for the cost of a 4GB flash drive you could probably upgrade to 1GB of memory which results in an even larger performance gain. That said, if you don't want to open up your system, ReadyBoost does actually work."

http://www.anandtech.com/syste...howdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=6