ReadyBoost in Vista; any good?

[rpc212]

Hi all,

Just wondering if anyone out there with Vista is using a USB drive with ReadyBoost and whether you can tell me if it actually boosts performance on memory intensive, read Vray rendering; 3ds Max, tasks?

Eg. Can you expand your memory with USB drives to where you have 4 gigs installed inside memory slots on the motherboard but have another 24 gigs of "ReadyBoost" ram via USB drives?


Cheers,

[teabag]

ive been wondering about that too!!!

[DaForce]

Well think about it.

RAM is extremely fast..many many many times faster than a harddrive,

Now when your ram runs out and starts paging to disk it slows down alot as we all know.
Now picture a USB drive which is slower then a normal HDD and you see what I mean.

It might well work but it will be SLOW

[^Lele^]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

[Neilg]

"However, it has to be considered that high-cost ($1,000-$50,000) flash memories currently have speeds up to 3 GB/s as random sustained external throughput with latency under 0.015 ms and up to 400,000 random IO/s"



I guess ram is cheaper then.

[beestee]

I have used it on my laptop and had a noticable amount of difference in processor usage at idle, an not in a good way. Being that the laptop has 2GB of RAM already, I didn't see the benefit in standard usage or gaming. Perhaps in photoshop or other memory heavy applications? I would like to see some tests that involve rendering with lots of dynamic geometry and bitmap textures!

[Blitterswitch]

As far as I have read, it will only show any real increase in performance if you have 512mb and you use a 512mb flash drive. If you have 1gb or more already you will not see any increase in performance. In fact in many of the news items I have read readyboost has been shown to actually decrease performance in systems with 1gb or more ram.

Basically its a neat little concept in theory and would have been a really fantastic little helper about 4 years ago when people had less than 512mb as standard in most desktop machines, but I think that with ram prices being so great now readyboost has little to no relevance today.

[rpc212]

thanks everyone for your input. The link Lele gave really explains "ReadyBoost" well. Well enough to know, along with all of your guys opinions, that it is really not much more than a gimmick. Too bad as the possibilities, if Flash memory were faster and ReadyBoost could access more than 4 gigs, would be huge for users like ourselves who use programs like Vray and Max.

Oh well . . .

KBO!

[LightCraft]

i have recently bought an i-ram from gigabyte
its a much better solution for booting up. does have only a 16 hour battery life if your pc goes down so a ups would be recommended.
upside is xp boots in only a few seconds. apps installed on the i-ram launch in less than a second.

[^Lele^]

Sure, ram is faster than harddrives (old ramdisk under dos...)
It's not quite what we're debating here, though, which goes through USB onto solid-state memories.
The i-ram goes through the SATA interface...
The reason why there is a (small) improvement with very little ram, under vista, is because the disk reads are being left alone on the boot drive, while the writes are being moved to the usb disk.
Have more ram (vista wants 880 megs to boot up, when left as standard), a second disk on which to swap, and you're sorted, and faster, anyways.

[^Lele^]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/...drives_cometh/

New 32GB solid state memory hdd.
Extremely fast reads, dog-slow writes.
And damn expensive for now.

[Paul Oblomov]

No perfomance boost at all. Vista Enterprise x64.