Hands on: Speed up with Readyboost

Since switching to Windows Vista from XP, my system doesn’t perform as quickly as before.

It’s certainly no slouch as far as hardware is concerned, based around an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 running at 2.66GHz with 2GB of Crucial DDR memory.

So I was intrigued by the performance claims behind Vista’s new Readyboost facility.

Readyboost exploits spare memory on Flash media, such as a USB key, to accelerate general performance. It creates an intermediate cache between the hard disk and Ram to provide Vista with a boost in performance.

Readyboost theory
Modern operating systems like Vista constantly swap data between the hard disk and main system Ram. Some of this activity is due to insufficient system Ram, but at other times, the OS is caching commonly used data for quicker retrieval in the future. The speed at which the OS can get hold of this cached data makes a big difference to overall performance.

Readyboost enables Vista to create an intermediate cache in Flash memory, such as a USB key. At first this seems odd, since hard disks deliver considerably quicker sequential data access, but decent Flash memory can outperform hard disks when it comes to small random-access transfers.

Since the Readyboost cache only contains duplicates of files that are still on the hard disk, there are no issues should you remove the Flash memory or decide to use it for transporting files instead. If Vista can’t find the required files on the Flash memory, or can’t find the device at all, it retrieves the files from the hard disk as before.

To support Readyboost, the Flash memory needs at least 2.5Mbytes/sec throughput for 4KB random reads and 1.75Mbytes/sec throughput for 512KB random writes. Flash devices claiming high speeds are normally referring to sequential transfers, so may not be up to the job here. If you’re buying media specifically for Readyboost, check with the manufacturer’s website for compatibility. Suffice it to say, you’ll also need USB2 connectivity.

Using Readyboost
Readyboost is easy to set up. Connect the Flash memory device and, if it’s sufficiently quick, Vista will ask if you’d like to use it to speed up the system. You can then choose how much of the device to use for Readyboost.