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Readyboost SDHC or USB 2.0 Flash drive

Last response: in Windows 7
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I am looking at using either an SDHC card or a USB flashdrive for Readyboost

I don't want a faster/bigger card/flash than either the card reader or Readyboost can handle.

I can get a Lexar Platinum II 32 GB 100x SD/SDHC Flash Memory Card LSD32GBSBNA100 for $55.

I can get a nice USB 2.0 flash drive like the SanDisk Cruzer CZ45 32GB Ultra USB Flash Drive for $79.95
Up to 15MB/s read speed. Up to 10 MB/sec write speed applies to the first 20 MB of data transfer.

per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost Readyboost has limitations
Windows 7 allows up to eight devices for a maximum of 256 GB of additional memory.

The device must have an access time of 1 ms or less.
The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device, and 1.75
MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device.

? Whats the top end for readyboost

The target machine is a Toshiba Portege R705-P35, Windows 7 64 bit

Budget under $60
SDHC or USB ?
What size ?
What speed ?

More about : readyboost sdhc usb flash drive

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Windows 7 Authority

Readyboost is an old technology from the days of RAM-constrained systems. These days you're much, much better off just adding some more RAM to your system to eliminate any unnecessary paging that might be going on. RAM is cheap.

gmgj said:
I am looking at using either an SDHC card or a USB flashdrive for Readyboost

I don't want a faster/bigger card/flash than either the card reader or Readyboost can handle.



I have a laptop with a 5400 rpm drive. Readyboost supposedly can help this. I put an 8gb card in my card reader and it would only let me allocate 4gb to Readyboost. I have not found a way around this. I am going with a 4GB class 10 card
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Windows 7 Authority

Readyboost doesn't really help your disk go any faster, what it does is to use the flash memory for the pagefile. This means that if your memory fills up it will page to the flash drive instead of to your disk drive.

But flash drives are still an awful lot slower than RAM. If you're really out of memory to the point where you're getting a lot of pagefile activity then you'd be a lot better off just buying more RAM to plug into your laptop.

If your goal is to speed up your disk drive then nothing will do it like an SSD.

Best solution

Copied from the wiki-link you mentioned in first post:
- Due to the fact that ReadyBoost cache is stored as a file, one has to format the flash drive as NTFS or exFAT in order to use more than 4 GB of space for caching because FAT16 and FAT32 impose file size limit of 2 and 4 GB respectively.

From same wiki-link:
- The core idea of ReadyBoost is that a flash drive has a much faster seek time (less than 1 ms), allowing it to satisfy requests faster than reading files from a hard disk. It also leverages the inherent advantage of two parallel sources from which to read data.

FYI: ReadyBoost is only boosting small files since your hard drive is faster for large files. A class 4 SDHC card might be faster than a class 10 SDHC card for ReadyBoost since access time is main factor and the SDHC classification is MB per second (class 10 is good for recording video or storing several large pictures in rapid sequence).

I guess you have an unused SDHC slot in your laptop so why not use it for ReadyBoost. The best boost comes by increasing memory, 4 GB is good for normal use. I guess you already have 2x2GB RAM, if you have 2GB or less then consider 4 GB since it will boost your system a lot more than ReadyBoost can do.

And: ReadyBoost is not same as pagefile! ReadyBoost is supposed to boost disk performance. Virtual memory or pagefile will transfer some of the memory contents to slow hard drive to avoid running out of free RAM (to avoid crash/blue screen).

borge said:
Copied from the wiki-link you mentioned in first post:
- Due to the fact that ReadyBoost cache is stored as a file, one has to format the flash drive as NTFS or exFAT in order to use more than 4 GB of space for caching because FAT16 and FAT32 impose file size limit of 2 and 4 GB respectively.


Thanks for the response. Would it not be nice that the vendor of Readyboost documented this feature.

It amazing how many people don't know that laptops/netbooks have limited RAM capacity. Like my netbook maxes out at 2GB.

Readyboost helps quite a bit. Another idea is getting a hybrid Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS, its 7200RPM, 32MB cache, and solid state memory for much less $$$ than an SSD drive.

sminlal said:
That's true, but even for disk caching you're still better off with more RAM.

Hmm... You might be correct, but if you have a machine with Windows 7 64bit, that uses DRR2's and you have 2x2gb already installed. Then you only option is to use Ready-Boost. I have a Acer Aspire 5100 that falls in this discussion at this point (Max Ram installed). I have a 7 port USB Hub /2.0. Using 7 USB/SDHC 32gb cards. I have eliminated all the cannot finds, slow loading...Whatever issues that came up before are gone.
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