Question:

Can you comment on if the new system of using CF cards as a memory boost really increases Windows Vista performance.  I think they call it ready boost.  I have tried it on a new Dell Quad Core system with an internal card reader and there does not seem to be any benifet at all.  The card I am using is an 8 gb 120x speed Transcend CF card.  Was this just a marketing scam on Microsoft’s part ?   I also have the 4 gb memory frustration that everybody else seems to have.  My system shows 3 gb installed.

Thanks,

Ed

Answer:

I did a pretty in-depth review of ReadyBoost performance here. It’s definitely not a “marketing scam”. Here’s the thing, though–the slower your hard disk is, the more benefit you’ll get from it. Conversely, the faster your hard disk, the less benefit you’ll get. You don’t mention what hard idsk you have, but if you’re rockin a quad-core, it’s gotta be pretty fast. Unless you have a really slow hard disk, you probably won’t notice the performance benefit. Nonetheless, it’ll still be helping in the background. It might help a lot, or might only help a little.

Unfortunately, there’s no good way to see how ReadyBoost is helping. I use a USB flash drive with an LED activity light on it so I can see when it’s working. That helps, but of course I don’t know if Vista is reading from the cache or writing to it. Additionally, the activity is often part of background processes, which wouldn’t really offer any noticable performance improvement anyway.

Also, for the record, the “120X” speed rating of your CF card is meaningless for ReadyBoost. That’s a measurement of the sequential read or write performance (ie., reading or writing an entire picture to/from the CF card). ReadyBoost only cares about random, non-sequential reads (like, retrieving the 140th byte of a database file). The reason for this is that the hard disk will ALWAYS be faster for sequential reads–however, flash memory is much faster than a hard disk for non-sequential reads.

Wish I could clear everything up for you, but there’s not currently any good way. If you have an extra CF card or flash drive, plug it in. It’ll help some, even if it’s not a lot. Don’t go out and buy a CF card or flash drive just for ReadyBoost, though.