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I have a USB flash drive that I dedicated to ReadyBoost on my Windows 7 PC.

Whenever I reboot my machine, it "forgets" that the USB drive is configured for ReadyBoost. What could be the reason for this?

Google reveals that there are several people with the same issue, but I have not found a conclusive answer so far.

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What kind of USB drive are you trying to use? Does it have an encryption partition/capabilities? – techie007 Apr 26 '10 at 15:35
@techie007: No, it doesn't. It's a plain USB thumb drive that I just have no other use for. – Tomalak Apr 26 '10 at 15:40
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As far as I understand it the USB sticks gets retested after reboot and if its performance is "on the fence" so to say it's possible that it might fail the ReadyBoost speed test.

You should be able to see it from the logs or from registry whats the issue. In Vista it's possible to turn off retesting the USB stick in registry, but I'm not sure if the same key works in Win 7. In Win 7 the registry section has less entries than in Vista.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Currentversion\Emdmgmt

Is the location of the registry dealing with the readyboost devices.

Should you fail to get ReadyBoost to behave like you want to then there is alternative 3rd party program doing the same thing (altho it is not free, unfortunately other than trial period) called EBoostr.It works fine in combination of ReadyBoost and superfetch as long as it's pointed at different drive than ReadyBoost. I myself went that route after poking at readyboost for a while trying it to get work on CF card in IDE slot of my motherboard. It was possible to trick it into working on it but it forgot it almost always after the reboot. EBoostr is a bit less picky about devices you use it on and is able to keep the cache over the reboot so it does not need to rebuild it. Although on USB stick not using encryption might be security risk - depending on how accessible is your PC for other people to "yank it out and walk away".

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If it is failing the retest, then I wouldnt use it. The flash media isnt fast enough. And anyways ReadyBoost offers no performance benefit on modern machines with decent memory. ReadyBoost was really designed for older machines with minimal memory to run Vista more efficiently. If you have 4 or more gigs of RAM, ReadyBoost is useless. – Keltari Sep 13 '11 at 3:44
I think that's a decent explanation. I've also long stopped trying it as I really see no benefit anymore. Thanks anyway! :) – Tomalak Sep 13 '11 at 6:08
ReadyBoost is more about masking the "HD Lag" than working as "virtual RAM". In my system with 5 hard disks in RAID array and 16 Gb of RAM I did small performance increase from using the ReadyBoost. As far as ReadyBoost test goes - most flash devices are pretty fast - what causes the device to fail at retest is usually the write speed. – Kert Tamm Sep 15 '11 at 12:41
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