Does Windows ReadyBoost have a meaningful impact on performance?

Question

If you use Windows Vista or Windows 7, what has been your experience with Windows ReadyBoost?

Do you find that it provides a meaningful performance boost, or is the effect negligible or negative? What circumstances may yield a gain, and what circumstances may yield no gain?

What are some tips to getting the most out of this feature, either on desktops, laptops, etc.?

Answer 1

I was very sceptical, having 6GB of ram on my 8730w laptop running 64bit Windows 7 RC. But, since SD cards is so cheap now, I went out and bought a Panasonic Class 10 (22MB/s) 8GB SD card and put it into my laptop and enabled ReadyBoost. To my surprise, it was quite a noticeable performance gain. One must understand though, that it's a cache kind of performance gain, meaning that you will notice a quite substantial improvement the 2nd, 3rd time you start an application. Nevertheless, I'm most certainly keeping the SD card in my laptop, it's "hidden" away and doesn't stick out like an USB stick.

Answer 2

www.anandtech.com did a vista performance review a couple of years ago and looked at this. Apparently readyboost is only of any use on PCs with 512MB of RAM. If you have any more than this, (and you really should), you won't notice any difference. ReadyBoost Performance

Answer 3

This is in a pretty specific case, but: I've used it for the past couple of years on my Toshiba m200 tablet. I had a 1GB card that I set the computer to use all of for ReadyBoost. Pretty much all of my times decreased by half. Sleep (and sleep recovery) is the only exception, because power drivers on my tablet couldn't handle sleep anyway.

I haven't done any testing with this on Windows 7.

As far as recommendations, Microsoft recommends using 1 to 3 times the amount of RAM you have in your system. See here.

Answer 4

Like so many things relating to performance, it has a lot to do with what you're doing and the other components in your system.

If you have a low-end PC, which I doubt anyone on a site called "Super User" would :-), it's probably beneficial. For those with capable systems with at least 2G memory (and 4-8G is becoming more common), ReadyBoost probably doesn't add enough performance increase to warrant dedication of an entire flash drive and more important USB port.

Memory is cheap, I just doubled my HTPC upgrading to 4G, using the same exact memory I built the system with originally (2x Corsair twinxsomethingfast) for less than half the price I paid a year ago ($35 vs ~$75). I have a 4G memory flash drive that I'd used with ReadyBoost prior, and it "feels" faster with the actual memory. Boot times are irrelevant, my system is a media/gaming PC and runs pretty much 24x7.

Answer 5

It always seemed to me to be sort of a kludge. If you want your applications to start up fast, put them on a SSD.

Answer 6

I found it sped up some things (shaved 10 seconds off the boot time) on a 1GB machine, but slowed down others (iTunes playback etc). In the end I didn't feel it was worth having a USB key sticking out of the laptop to warrant it.

Answer 7

Yes, yes it does...I noticed a huge difference in Vista a few years ago when I tried it.

I've seen recommendations to not use a flash drive more than 2.5 times the size of your available RAM, but I'm not certain how much factual basis there is to this.

Answer 8

ReadyBoost was designed to be faster access memory than most laptop hard drives.

Sort of between the system RAM and the hard drive.

Most laptop hard drives spin at 5400 rpm and have access times of about 10 to 15 ms for random reads and writes. By comparison flash memory has access times of 4 to 6 ms for equivalent random reads and writes.

What ReadyBoost was designed to do was place the most often or recently used 2 to 8 GB of data on the flash memory where accessing it would be at least twice as fast as reading it from the hard drive.