Gaming Vista's ReadyBoost?

[Raki]

Heya,

so if I got ReadyBoost right I put in a SD card/USB thumbdrive to use it as some kind of additional "RAM". But aren't most HDDs faster than a cheap SD card/usb thumbdrive?
Or do you use it to avoid the spin up time of a HDD (+ more power consumption in Notebooks cases)?

 

[p1ngpong]

Taken off wikipedia.

The core idea of ReadyBoost is that a flash drive has a much faster seek time (less than 1 millisecond), allowing it to satisfy the requests fairly quickly compared to a hard drive when booting or reading certain system files. It also leverages the inherent advantage of having two parallel sources from which to read data. Unfortunately USB flash drives are slow in terms of reads and writes, compared to modern desktop hard drives. Desktop hard drives can sustain anywhere from 2 to 10 times the transfer speed of USB flash drives. The USB flash drives hold an advantage in random access times which are typically around 1ms, compared to the 12ms and upwards of desktop hard drives.

Rest of the entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

 

[UltraMagnus]

its not a new idea, windows/linux has been able to put its swap file/partition on a separate drive for ages.

a few years ago when i actually used a desktop one way I got a little more speed out of it was putting in a pci SCSI card and a 8gb high speed SCSI hard drive, it made paging a lot faster. of course, with the amount of RAM pcs these days have i doubt it will make a great deal of difference.

 

[Raki]

would it make any difference if you use a cheap 2 GB SD card in a Notebook with 3 GB of RAM?

This reminds me of these hybrid HDDs/SSDs the army uses/used

 

[fearofblood]

It's pretty much useless. You won't see much of a performance gain.

 

[Prime]

It's pretty much useless. You won't see much of a performance gain.

You do see a Performance gain if you have very little ram.