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I've brought an 4GB SD card and I'm dedicating it for use by ReadyBoost (on Windows7)

Im looking to get the most profit on performance, so i've formatted it with exFAT (as recommended by Microsoft) but I have some doubts to define what best *.Allocation Unit Size** I should choose.

Since I can't get how ReadyBoost/SD card exactly read/seek the data, can someone tell what make choosing an Allocation Unit Size in favor of another for this scheme ?

Apparently, ReadyBoost is allocating all the free space in SD card as one huge file, so a big Allocation Unit Size is advised for fastest reading time. I'm not confusing with ordinary HDD's ?

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    How much memory do you have in your system? Readyboost is only really of use in memory starved systems that have 1GiB or less of RAM... anandtech.com/show/2163/3
    – Mokubai ♦
    Jun 13, 2010 at 18:13
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    Using ReadyBoost-capable flash memory for caching allows Windows 7 and Vista to service random disk reads with performance that is typically 80-100 times faster than random reads from traditional hard drives.-from wikipedia. to not confuse with "paging files" ... nothing to do with the memory
    – user8228
    Jul 15, 2010 at 0:11
  • Can you link to where Microsoft recommends exFAT for ReadyBoost?
    – endolith
    May 6, 2011 at 4:38

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I would use exFAT, it has slightly bit better performance than the others and will also allow you to use more then 4 GB of space for ReadyBoost.

For the allocation unit size, I belive 4 kB will work the best but I could be wrong. This is the size of the chuncks that ReadyBoost uses and it will give you the best performance for ReadyBoost.

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According to this SevenForums page, "if you're going to use the drive exclusively for readyboost, try out exFAT with 32 mb allocation unit size."

http://www.sevenforums.com/performance-maintenance/127722-exfat-formatting-readyboost.html

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    Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Jan 17, 2015 at 18:03
  • using such a big allocation unit size won't work. Pendrives and memory cards are very slow compared to HDDs. They just have a lower latency. Therefore ReadyBoost will read small pages from flash drives and bigger ones from HDD. Using big allocation sizes on the flash drive will defeat the purpose because the time to read 32MB of data from flash may be slower than reading the same amount of data from HDD, even when the access time of HDD is longer
    – phuclv
    Sep 16, 2018 at 11:44

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