CompactFlash and ReadyBoost on a Vista-64 bits system

Question

I have an old HP iPaq with a CF card of 16 GB. New card, old device. It works fine. Or worked fine, I should say, since it fell to the ground and is damaged beyond repair... So I have a new and more modern iPaq now. Unfortunately, the new one uses a mini-SD card and not CF. So now I have a huge CF card available as additional storage for my PC.

Then I noticed a question here at SU about ReadyBoost and couldn't help but wonder... I have a 64-bits Vista system with 12 GB of RAM. Quite a lot already. (But needed for some processes.) Thus, ReadyBoost could use more than the 4 GB limit that ReadyBoost has on 32-bits systems. So questions:

1) Could I use this card as a ReadyBoost card for Vista-64 to increase the amount of RAM even further? 2) If it works, would the performance of my system increase? 3) Has anyone ever tried this already?

Answer 1

ReadyBoost is only valuable when you have less then 4GB of RAM. When running 12GB of RAM and adding ReadyBoost it will hardly if ever get used. Optimal ReadyBoost usage is on systems which only has 512MB to 1GB of RAM. It's also highly recommended in Laptop scenarios where memory upgrades aren't always easily possible.

However, in your case, the easiest way to figure out if it is making a difference is to actually do it, and then use Process Explorer to see if you can pickup a significant difference in performance.

ReadyBoost enables and disables fairly easily so it would really not cause any damage.

Answer 2

You should profile your CF and HDD performance.

If the CF is faster than your HDD, you should partition it and put your swap files on it.

If it is slower, then you should use it for long tern storage.

ReadyBoost is only useful for systems that are tight on RAM.

Answer 3

You may use this as a ReadyBoost device.

The performance increase will not be any significant (12GB of RAM!! Grrr.) - I'd rather you utilize the huge amount of RAM you have and create a RAM disk and pour your temp files + cache directories into it.

Tried this on a 8GB system - super minimal performance gains.