Any actual gains from using Readyboost?

I ordered my T61 with a media card slot in place of the expresscard slot, and I was wondering if putting in a high speed (150x) 2GB SD card as a readyboost device would give any noticeable performance increase in Vista.

Anyone tried this before?

 

Really depends in part how much memory you have. The less memory you have, the more you will notice it. 4GB of memory would be better though, significantly, than 2GB of memory and 2GB of readyboost though.

 

big N-O for you

 

996GT2,

I've moved your thread to the Windows OS and Software section so you can receive better assistance.

 

Well, I've got 3 GB of RAM installed right now, so I guess Readyboost isn't that necessary.

Thanks for the advice

 

USB/SD card has a peak bandwidth of say 30-60mb/s

3gb 667mhz ram has peak bandwidth of 8gb/s

or 10.6gb/s with 4gb dual channel

 

Yeah, if you have 2GB of RAM there is no need for ready boost. If you have 1GB of ram it is better from a performance and price standponit to upgrade to 2-4GB of RAM instead of a Readyboost device. I think MS designed ReadyBoost when memory was rediculously expensive, but now it is so cheap there is no point in the feature.

 

Your memory bandwidth with dual channel DDR2-667 is 5.33GB/s. Doesn't matter if you have 3GB or 4GB or 10GB of actual RAM.

 

Sorry but thats incorrect. Thats only for a SINGLE channel.

667mhz * 8bytes * 1 channel = 5.3gb/s

667mhz * 8bytes * 2 channels = 10.6gb/s

The whole point of dual channel is to double the bandwidth.

But in the end it is still bottlenecked by your CPU's FSB. It cant communicate fast enough.

200mhz x Quad pumped x 8bytes/64bits = 6.4gb/s

 

Greater the size of memory, more data can be stored in the active memory, hence more efficient multi-tasking and running memory-intensive tasks....

 

He meant for the peak bandwidth , which is true. Size doesnt matter but the speed does.

64bit = single channel
128bit = dual channel

Double bandwidth

 

Yeah, and to add to what you're saying, I've heard that trying to use ReadyBoost on a system already outfitted with 4GB of RAM would actually cause a noticeable decline in performance.

 

I would advise not to turn off ReadyBoost in Services even if you're not using it, as I experienced a much slower startup after disabling it.

 

It doesnt. Just for gits and shiggles, I configured a 4gb SD for Readyboost a couple weeks ago as a test on my 6860FX and have noted no decline in performance whatsoever. To be fair, I havent noticed any increase either. But to be honest up until this post I forgot I had it in!

 

When i first got Vista and only had 2gb RAM, i used a whole 4gb stick for readyboost and improvements were little to none.

 

Really? Then I guess that's another one of those myths that gets perpetuated because I've definitely heard it from a number of sources. Thanks for clarifying that for me. I hate feeling like I've given someone the wrong information.

 

No worries! That was the whole reason I tried it, as I wanted to see if the rumors were true.

 

I found ReadyBoost would kick in and start caching files while I'm playing a game, making everything stutter. I avoid it.

 

Ditto. It's probably more effective for multi-tasking running multiple apps. I heard it's not much of a help is you have more than 2GB ram, can anyone confirm this?

 

Yes, ill vouch that its useless. Theres benchmarks for readyboost, go google it.

 

Although, I do not have concrete proofs, I do have personal experience of my system slowed down because of ReadyBoost. I have in my system 2 GB of RAM. It is especially evident during the decompression part of Gears of War Installation when the harddisk is utilized intensively. When I removed my USB stick and reinstalled the game (since the first installation failed, Gears of War was one heck of a port), the harddisk gets noisy and generally it feels like the decompression part of the installation finished slight quicker during the second installation.

The reason why I attributed the slow down to ReadyBoost is that when I was installing Gears of War, the USB usage indicator (the blue LED) kept blinking, which troubles me, I thought ReadyBoost is there to help the HD by storing small files that are frequently accessed. It troubles me to see my USB used during decompression of large .cab files for GoW. Also, USB transfer rate is generally much slower than HD's transfer rate.

In conclusion if you have 2 GB of RAM or more, Ready Boost won't and might even slow your system down.