Seagate Momentus XT hybrid vs Windows 7 ReadyBoost

[Eug]

I have an SSD in my MacBook Pro, and was thinking of putting another one in my 11" Windows 7 Home ultraportable. I had one in there earlier actually, but it used too much battery life so I returned it. I was thinking of getting a lower power one, but then got the idea of just using ReadyBoost for the time being until the SSD prices drop. (I'd like to get a decent and low power non-Sandforce 96 GB drive for under $100.)

I put in a 4 GB Class 10 SD card formatted to FAT32 and even on this Pentium SU4100 with 2 GB RAM it's made a huge improvement in application launch times (after the initial app loading after boot). In fact, considering I only paid $399 for this machine and it's not my main laptop, I'm inclined to skip the SSD completely since it's much more tolerable now.

I'm curious though, since the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive doesn't do write caching either, how bad is ReadyBoost (after the initial app loading) compared to the Seagate in real world usage? I don't reboot that often, so boot times are not a huge concern to me.

Also, will formatting to NTFS speed up ReadyBoost at all?

 

[Eug]

Also, is 4 GB the sweet spot for ReadyBoost? I figure at ~$10, a 4 GB Class 10 card for ReadyBoost is a nice cheap and low power upgrade for a notebook (or a small form factor desktop with a laptop hard drive).

I'm guessing 2 GB is probably too anemic, and 8 GB is overdoing it and would take longer to fill up after bootup anyway. I note the Seagate hybrid drive has 4 GB of flash.

 

[corkyg]

My laptop's boot drive is a Momentus XT, and as such, ReadyBoost does not apply. I don't know about Macs, but in PCs, ReadyBoost is for removable devices, not internals.

 

[Eug]

My laptop's boot drive is a Momentus XT, and as such, ReadyBoost does not apply. I don't know about Macs, but in PCs, ReadyBoost is for removable devices, not internals.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but my question was about Windows PCs, and how well ReadyBoost (using a fast 4 GB flash card with a standard hard drive) compares against the Momentus XT hybrid.

The hybrid would retain cache info after a restart which would reduce boot times and eliminate the need to reload the cache after a restart, but other than that, would ReadyBoost function similarly well, or would the hybrid still be significantly better? (I've never used a Momentus XT.)

 

[Ratman6161]

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but my question was about Windows PCs, and how well ReadyBoost (using a fast 4 GB flash card with a standard hard drive) compares against the Momentus XT hybrid.

The hybrid would retain cache info after a restart which would reduce boot times and eliminate the need to reload the cache after a restart, but other than that, would ReadyBoost function similarly well, or would the hybrid still be significantly better? (I've never used a Momentus XT.)

ReadyBoost is not something that has gotten a lot of attention in enthusiast circles. The reviews of it when it first came out with Vista said that it only really improved performance if your system was fairly low on RAM. As I recall if you had more than 2 GB RAM there was no noticeable improvement. In my own laptop (2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo with 3 GB of RAM), I've tried it and can say that I can't notice any difference with or without readyboost. I've tried sd cards from 1 GB up to 4 GB.

Since it never really gets much press I don't know of any real world comparison with the Momentus Hybrid drive. But personally my expectation would be that with the Momentus already doing caching to flash memory that is probably faster than any SD card anyway, there would be nothing to gain from ReadyBoost. But that's just a guess. Probably the only way to know for sure is to try it.

 

[biostud]

maybe ready boost will get a 2nd round with usb3 pens.

 

[Eug]

ReadyBoost is not something that has gotten a lot of attention in enthusiast circles. The reviews of it when it first came out with Vista said that it only really improved performance if your system was fairly low on RAM. As I recall if you had more than 2 GB RAM there was no noticeable improvement. In my own laptop (2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo with 3 GB of RAM), I've tried it and can say that I can't notice any difference with or without readyboost. I've tried sd cards from 1 GB up to 4 GB.

Since it never really gets much press I don't know of any real world comparison with the Momentus Hybrid drive. But personally my expectation would be that with the Momentus already doing caching to flash memory that is probably faster than any SD card anyway, there would be nothing to gain from ReadyBoost. But that's just a guess. Probably the only way to know for sure is to try it.

With my machine, ReadyBoost made a very significant difference. However, I only have 2 GB RAM, and I specifically purchased a Class 10 SD card for it. (Class 10 has a minimum 10 MB/s transfer rate.) I'm also running Windows 7. (Vista's ReadyBoost supposedly was pretty rudimentary.)

I'm not sure if ReadyBoost would work very well with say a Class 4 SD card (which is minimum 4 MB/s).

maybe ready boost will get a 2nd round with usb3 pens.

Yeah maybe, but then again with a USB 3 machine you'd probably have 4-8 GB RAM in it anyway.

I was thinking more along the lines of upgrades to old machines with 2.5" hard drives and limited memory slots.

I have two such machines, one's an 11.6" Pentium SU4100 ultraportable, and the other is a Acer Revo Atom machine. See sig.