ReadyBoost what?

So, today, I heard about this fan-dangled ReadyBoost thing in Windows, and I thought I’d try it out.

From what I understand, I can use a USB memory stick as extra RAM for my PC – this sounds great, as I’ve recently bought an 8GB memory stick.  It has to be worth a try!

Side note: Considering that I practically *live* on a PC, I’m really surprised that this one slipped by me.  I’m a bit taken a-back that something that has the power to do this, is something that I already own, and I can try out for nothing, other than a little time!

So, here goes!  Working totally off of intuition alone, lets see how far I get.

Here’s a few techie-details about what I’m working with:

• System Spec: Dell Vostro running Windows 7 Ultimate
• Memory Stick: SanDisk Cruzer Blade 8GB (approx. £14)

Crack-on.

So, I’m guessing I need to insert USB memory stick into the PC, as this is slightly important to the process.  This is the box that Windows 7 makes happen:

I’m guessing it’s the last option that I need, so I’ll go for that one. Here’s the next screen that appear:

In the screen above, I’ve got the option to:

• Do not use this device
• Dedicate this device to ReadyBoost
• Use this device.

It appears that I am limited to using 4GB of the available 8 on the stick, so I’ll go in heavy with the ‘Dedicate this device’ to see where that takes me.  Clicking ‘Ok’ makes the following box appear:

Once this has finished, the above box disappears, leaving me to wonder what’s happened, if anything. Lets go looking..

Inside the ‘Computer’ screen, the drive appears to be used, around the 4GB mark…

Checking what’s inside (because I’m nosey) here’s what it shows:

So, that’ll be my 4GB file then. Now. What does it actually do? Hmm. I don’t actually know, nor how to use it.

Time to start reading the manual. Or Wikipedia, at least. Here’s what it says:

“ReadyBoost is a component of Microsoft Windows, first introduced with Microsoft's Windows Vista in 2006 and bundled with Windows 7 in 2009. It works by using flash memory, a USB flash drive, SD card, CompactFlash, external hard drive or any kind of portable flash mass storage system as a drive for disk cache.

ReadyBoost is also used to facilitate SuperFetch, which allows it to perform analysis of boot-time disk usage patterns and creates a cache which is used in subsequent system boots

Using ReadyBoost-capable flash memory (NAND memory devices) 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. This caching applies to all disk content, not just the page file or system DLLs. Flash devices typically are slower than a hard disk for sequential I/O so, to maximize performance, ReadyBoost includes logic that recognizes large, sequential read requests and has the hard disk service these requests.

When a compatible device is plugged in, the Windows AutoPlay dialog offers an additional option to use the flash drive to speed up the system; an additional "ReadyBoost" tab is added to the drive's properties dialog where the amount of space to be used can be configured. 250 MB to 256 GB of flash memory can be assigned (4 GB in the x86 versions of Vista and Windows 7). ReadyBoost compresses and encrypts, with AES-128, all data that is placed on the flash device; Microsoft has stated that a 2:1 compression ratio is typical, so that a 4 GB cache could contain upwards of 8 GB of data.”

So, it appears that after a few minutes of looking online, that’s all I need to do to make use of the space on the memory stick.  There’s no obvious signs that the USB stick is in use, such as any increase inside Task Manager, as that still shows the 4GB of real RAM on my PC. 

I can only assume that is what it needs, and I’ll have to check back another time with any results I find on using it.

In terms of testing this, I’ve got a load of videos of my little son to mess around with; I could try that to see what effect it has, if any. Watch this space.