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61 Comments
- Diggtatorship, on 10/12/2007, -4/+39Im not speaking from experience here, since I've avoided Vista like the plague, but isn't there potentially some good reason that it requires a high speed drive? Like, i dunno, maybe you get absolutely NO benefit from it otherwise. Or maybe you actually loose performance since it's assuming that certain transfer speeds can be maintained, when in fact they can't...
Like I said, its just a theory, but when it comes to prefetching it seems like failing to meet the expected transfer speeds could actually introduce some problems or at least negate any possible benefits. - LMControl, on 10/12/2007, -5/+24Apparently their server isn't Ready Boost™ capable.....
- cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -8/+24Not a marketer's myth, since Microsoft themselves never touted it as a replacement for RAM.
But they did not provide a clear explanation of that during development in that it is more than just swap, it also acts to enhance prefetch algorithms and possibly some temporary data that can benefit from the rapid access when using small datasets.
@jamesfaction, I've used several types of USB sticks and once one is detected as Readyboost capable, it has never been rejected afterward. I have seen it lose track of the readyboost.cache file on the fat32 formatted device, which can require either disabling and re-enabling readyboost on the thumbdrive, or reformatting the flash to get Vista to see it without the file tags.
What you might be seeing are reports from people who think the "high-speed" sticks they bought on sale are the same as the USB flash modules that are designed for faster writes as well as reads.
As I understand it, the algorithms used for readyboost are designed to work evenly over the cells of the flash chips, and modern flash can measure write operations in the millions before individual cells start to fail from excess wear. In other words, by the time you might see a flash drive getting worn down from readyboosts cache (which is not virtual RAM), you would probably be looking at replacing the system as a whole from all the other parts that are starting to wear down too. - cyssero, on 04/18/2009, -0/+13This is exactly right, you hit the nail on the head diggtatorship. This 'hack' has been known for a long time now, but it is not advised as if you force ReadyBoost to use a slower memory device, it will (*gasp!*) actually SLOW down Vista. It's not just a theory, it's the truth. Not all USB drives are made the same, some may have very little fast flash memory with the rest being rather slow. This is another one of those hacks like "disable your paging file to make Windows heaps faster!". Go ahead and try it, but you'll probably notice your computer operating slower than usual. Hey, if you can prove me otherwise that's great, but from what I've seen and read, it will just slow operations down.
- ahhell, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13"Imagine if Ford or GM made cars that after a year or so their performance began to drop considerably."
Have you even owned a Ford or a GM car? - LMControl, on 10/12/2007, -6/+17"I digg you up for you trying to attempt to make a joke, but you did fail. Ready Boost has nothing to do with how reliable servers are. But nice try."
You know.... it's just a joke. You should try laughing a little and not judging everything by it's technical merit. People like you give geeks a bad name. - HalFTW, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Wikipedia has a good article on it. Decide for yourself if it's a marketer's myth:
"To illustrate how much of an advantage this really is, consider a 1ms flash drive capable of sustaining 24Mbps (slightly higher than average), compared to a hardrive that has a seek time of 8ms and a throughput of 60Mbps (slightly lower than average). By the time the harddrive is ready to start sending data, the flashdrive will have had 7ms to send data at 24Mbps (which is 168Kb, or 21kb). After the initial 21kb, the harddrive will have sent more data than the flash drive at 13ms after the initial request. By 50ms, the harddrive will have read more than double the data of the flash drive. Clearly, there's no advantage if you are reading files larger than 21 kilobytes in size on modern hardware except due to the fact that you have multiple sources to read from (this can be addressed by using RAID for the harddrives in the computer)."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_boost - rix0r, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost
Wikipedia to the rescue! - estvir, on 10/12/2007, -5/+12No, it's a feature and do you have something to backup your claim that Windows Vista has universal 'slow performance' ?
And not all Vista users need this it's simply an optional thing for those with limited RAM; what happens when you have limited RAM on OSX/Linux ? I'm loving how you make out /not/ having a feature (Though this is capable with Linux, I've tried it out myself but it's not on par with the work Microsoft put into it) is some how a good thing. - AMSRay, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I bought a 2 gig USB drive from a no-name company and Vista said it was too slow. A quick Google search found the work around to trick Vista into using it anyway, but I didn't see much boost from using it. Then I bought a 2 gig Sony USB drive that was on sale. Vista immediately offered to set up ReadyBoost. I used the program HD TACH to compare the two, and the Sony had access time of 1ms with throughput of almost 13 MB/s, while the no-name had a access time of 5.4 ms and throughput of only 7MB/s. Needless to say, I CAN see the a performance difference using the Sony USB drive. While typical hard disks have a much higher throughput (50 MB/s or more), 1 ms random access time from flash drive blows away the 15 ms access time of a good SATA drive. For reference, my PC is an AMD 64 3700 CPU and I've only got 1 GB RAM. I'm not promoting Sony here, I just found it on sale for $19, so I tried it. I'm assuming you would see similar performance from other established brand names.
- gallyjh, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I won't give you the explanation directly, but here is the interview with the maker of the technology and his explanation. It's actually a really cool concept.
http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=242429 - code_of_life, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Duggmirror got it: http://duggmirror.com/tech_news/Use_any_USB_stick_to_ReadyBoost_your_computer_2/
Reading lots of small files from a flash drive "definitely" much faster than reading the full file from a mechanical hdd. Its a great idea to make use of the low random access latency of the flash drive.
Quote:
HKLM (Local Machine) -> SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows NT -> CurrentVersion -> EMDgmt. You'll have a list of USB devices the computer has encountered, one of which should be your USB stick. Click on it.
Here there's a few details you need to edit. Double click on Device Status and change the value to 2, then ok. Do the same for ReadSpeedKBs and WriteSpeedKBs, changing their values to both 1000. - MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Absolutely not.
Readyboost is different from a pagefile. It's specially rigged only to use it when it can get performance benifits from the superior random seek time of the drive. - Hardcase, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5From Matt Ayers, program manager of Windows Performance Group:
"Q: I can't get my device to work with ReadyBoost... can I lower the perf requirements?
A: Unfortunately, no. We've set the perf requirements to the lowest possible throughput that still makes your system faster. If we lowered the perf requirements, then there wouldn't be a noticeable benefit to using ReadyBoost. Remember, we're not adding memory, we're improving disk access."
So, technically, he's wrong, you _can_ lower the requirements. But why would you? - PhoebusApollo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Editing the registry to do something that very well could make your computer slower? Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Readyboost, for those of you like maninblac1 who actually read up on it, can make the computer slower if your USB stick isn't up to the speed test which Vista itself already has built in. I trust Vista's test of the device is good enough to determine if it's Readyboost capable or not... this hack is not a good idea.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Readyboost != RAM
Readyboost != RAM
Readyboost != RAM
Readyboost is a specialized feature to alleviate cache miss penalties. Is that clear to anybody? - maninblac1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Executing this "hack" is not as wise as it may sound. Here's why.
Readyboost is designed to "speed up" your system, in certain circumstances, adding a flash ram drive would slow your computer down overall. Vista detects and understands this and may not enable readyboost on a drive that does qualify otherwise.
Enter: "But flash drives are always faster than hard drives"....ERRR, wrong.
Take for example this kind of machine.
4GB of DDR2 800
4x500GB RAID 5 x 7200RPM
Obviously these are hefty specs for a desktop. The minimum spec for readyboost is 1MB/s read/write. That 4 drive array is going to read at ~150MB/s sequential and write ~50-60MB/s sequential. Vista values throughput over latency since even though you may read 50x faster, you get 150x more data with the hard drives. Let's also not forget that there is ample high bandwidth memory to cache any data we may ever need. In these situations no drive will ever "qualify" for readyboost, you can run the evaluation over and over and the drive will not qualify.
They weren't dumb when they designed readyboost, i'd advise users to think before bothering with this "hack". - MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4If you have a crapload of RAM, you're probably not going to notice a difference.
- s-m-a-c-k, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4ahhell... SD cards (Secure Digital) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_Card are flash-based memory in a little plastic case... if you plug them in a usb memory card reader you can access the card like a DRIVE!!! Wow! That said, ReadyBoost takes advantage of USB-connected Flash Memory, regardless of packaging...
ass... - majortom1981, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Sometimes vista cant detect the speed of the drive and fails the drive anyway and you cant use ready boost on it.
I have two sd cards where vista cant detect the read speed of the cards and doesnt allow the sd cards to be used.
Thats why I manually forced them to work.
This isnty used just to get slower cards to work. ITs also used to get cards that vista fails to get the stats for to work. - s-m-a-c-k, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3while it is true that Windows systems slow down after months/years of use, it is also true that the cause of the slowdown is usually attributed to the end-user loading every piece of crap bloatware they can download and neglecting suggested 'housecleaning' tasks, such as defragmentation and disk scanning....
- dkokkos, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I have tried on my other PC where I have installed vista.... i have 1GB ram and i added one of my 2GB memory sticks.... to be honest i haven't seen any difference.... cause i was pushing my machine to the limits with the memory stick and without it...
- MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I've been using Vista for 6 months.
It doesn't have the same slow down problem that XP did. I believe they've solved it somehow. Whether through virtualization of the registry and filesystem for non-admin apps, or a series of automated cleanup tasks, or windows defender, somehow they've fixed it. - lowbot, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2>Wikipedia has a good article on it. Decide for yourself if it's a marketer's myth:
The article doesnt address that fact that if you are pulling data from the USB drive, you are now freeing the head of the HD to grab other data that is queued up. Also, readyboost ties in with prefetch, so just looking at the numbers isnt going to be complete because the author is ignoring the on-disk caching.
I dont think its going to be some huge performance booster, but lower end machines that are always paging could get a noticable boost. The gains become more and more marginal on nicer high-end machines. In other words its a gimmick for your handmade core duo system, but it is also something you might want to put on your grandma's PC. - socket, on 10/12/2007, -7/+8"Sooner or later, everyone's computer tends to slow down. Call it old age or simply doing too much, but even the most cutting edge PC's seem to lag after a year or so of use."
LAWL!@!# Yes if you use XP or Vista as your OS this would be true. It's pretty funny to see that as the opening to an article on "Windows Vista Magazine". Like it's the damn hardware's fault the OS is slowing it down. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I tried readyboost when i ran vista ultimate 64 bit, but it didn't make a difference, things didn't seem faster ? and i kept getting issues with the readyboost cache
- supermajic, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Someone please explain this technology for me :). I'm lost. From what I gather, it is plugging a usb into a high speed port and using it as extra (probably considerably slower) ram? Help?
- drsox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Service Unavailable - they need to readyboost their server :>
- DarknessGP, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Are you sure the reading/writing was high speed, and that it wasn't that it was USB 2.0 and therefore on the box it probably read "high-speed USB" Which doesn't mean high speed reading/writing.
Seems to me that the real confusion is actually coming from makers of USB drives not accurately describing the product. Not once have I ever seen the term "high-speed USB flash ..." unless it was referring to the fact that it uses USB 2.0 All the read/write stuff was actual stats of speed, not just a generic "high speed" label. - chingy1788, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sorry for double posting
I just looked at the wikipedia's article on ready boost...
I am using RoadKil's HDD Tests
which reports for my ready boost drive : 4.5MB/s random
SD card with USB card reader : 3.5 MB/s random
not sure on if thats 4k or 512b read/writes though, could some one clarify? - OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1These people don't want to listen to reason. If MS says it, it must be true.
Anyway, you know when the supposed performance boost is so minimal, if any, that there's a debate over whether it exists or not, it's probably not quite as good as the hype claims. - gnosticlust, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@cquinnd:
modern flash transparently levels writes. I'd be really surprised if *any* USB flash drives had non-levelling flash in them. - chodaboy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Uh, somehow this doesn't seem like a good idea. FlashRAM used in these USB sticks have a limited number of read/write cycles (unlike regular static DRAM.) Eventually you're going to be introducing bit-level errors into your data.
- maninblac1, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1major, you missed the point of my statement
In many cases, the card is indeed fast enough to meet readyboost specs, if your computer's hard drives perform faster than the flash drive, why would you want to use the slow flash drive then? That's just dumb - chingy1788, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1For Ready boost I would think that it is necessary to look at the random read/write speed not the sequential
I tried it just then, and i killed my theory before, its not just about the access time its about the random read/write speed...
though I was using a O2Micro SD card reader which suprisingly enough reads at < 1MB/s... and gives a response time of 5 ms...
I will test it using the USB card reader
generic USB stick gives 4.5MB/s random, 9 MB/s sequential and about 1ms response, which is good for vista, I think You may get away with 3MB/s at 1ms if using the hack, but I'm not sure I will try it out later
HDD speeds are about 2 - 3MB/s random for a very standard one, higher performance you might get 4 - 5MB/s out of it maybe more... - MajorBlud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I've tried ReadyBoost on two different machines using 5 or 6 different USB flash drives including SD cards, and couldn't get it working with any of them. Some of them were on the list supported by MS too. Anybody have a cache of this page?
- cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You can, there are already designs on the market that add a readyboost capable flashcard to one of the internal USB headers on the motherboard. If the idea takes off, and the usable space is available, we might start to see boards with build in flash within a generation or two.
- Topher06, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Yeah, game performance is slow in VIsta, not going to argue as video drivers are still very immature for the OS, although I question the "application" benchmarks from Tom's Hardware. Been using VIsta in one form or another for almost a year, and most applications perform as well as they ever did on XP. They are only testing 3D applications, which again rely on immature video drivers. How about testing NON 3D applications not based on video drivers to get a real accurate benchmark.
As for Readyboost, note that MOST USB drives are not high speed drives, even if the manufacturer says so, it just means its faster then another model they sell. I am only starting to see USB drivers marketed as ReadyBoost capable in the last month that have speeds at least over 10mb/s.
In any case, I constantly see arguments about this feature and honestly its rediculous. You can do more for your system by simply setting up a RAID stripe set, in many cases adding a second hard drive for a RAID is about the same cost as adding a 2-4gb USB drive that is ReadyBoost capable, and you will actually double your performance with a RAID setup. - Eccles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@Halftw: So how about using two flash drives? Or three? Or 10? Turn that 24 MB/s into 240. You could fit a "RAID" of flash memory into a space smaller than a typical hard drive.
- scottwilkins, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0This article is not too bright, if the flash drive is slow enough not to work, then it's slower than your hard drive. This will end up slowing your system down rather than speeding it up. Better idea: Buy a faster flash drive. They are darn cheap right now, just check reviews to ensure how fast it is.
- MajorBlud, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0@maninblac1
Exactly, flash memory doesn't help much when it's choked by a 480Mbps bus. Both machines I've tested the flash memory on have hefty amounts of RAM, so Vista may just be telling me that the USB sticks don't pass the ReadyBoost test. - bobartig, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I thought that Matt Ayers guy said that Readyboost was for things like 4k random read/write performance, basically taking advantage of the low seek time of the solid state device for tiny bits of data. If you need a few hundred tiny bits of data from your hard drive, which can be read from your Readyboost drive, you'll probably 'feel' a difference (like your apps being 'snappier').
But Ayers also said that you would expect less of an improvement in powerful systems, which ostensibly have the resources to run optimally. - OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1[quote]So is this one of the only actual good features of Vista?[/quote]
No. I am also still trying to find the others. They seem to be eclipsed by all the bad features of Vista. - chingy1788, on 10/12/2007, -6/+5hmmm
I think if the USB Drive is faster than the HDD Drive at random reads and response time, its worth using as ready boost media - ahhell, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Why would you want to use SD cards over an actual Flash drive? Most SD cards read/write way slower than a decent flash drive. You would also be at the mercy of the card reader.
The combination of the two would essential negate any benefit of using ReadyBoost. - Brereton55, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Site is dead
This link worked for me though
http://www.windowsvistamagazine.com/US/05582469248596696351/use-any-usb-stick-to-readyboost-your-computer.html - kenwestin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Anybody found a security hole for this yet...maybe a way to deploy some of the USB trojans out there?
- SniperSlap, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Readyboost is for morons.
- nubnub, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1Why can't you just have this built into motherboard?
- chris9902, on 10/12/2007, -8/+6there is a reason not all USB keys work.
unless Microsoft have some sort of high-speed USB key monopoly we don't know about yet............. -
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