Indera writes (in response to my original ReadyBoost article):

“i found the article very interesting.
what i can’t figure out how many gb the usb hard drive needs to be in order to utilize this feature.
the largest usb drive that i have right now is a 512 mb. is that sufficient or do i need a larger one.

you also mention using an sd card, what size should it be and what speed.
would i have to keep the sd card in the build it sd slot on my laptop
i have a 2gb 150x sd card. if i use this will it make a difference or do i need an sd card with more space.

i understand that this will only improve i/o performance, but that would help me because i open a lot of 3-10 gb word processing documents and sometimes they take longer then i would like waiting for them to open and/or save.

any help would be greatly appreciated.
i also think it would be helpful if this info was added to your web site, as i suspect, that i’m not the only one that wants to know what the minimum drive size is needed to use this feature.

thank you
indera”

The most important factor is the speed of your flash or SD card, not the size. Unfortunately, their speed depends on many different factors (including both the speed of the card and the speed of the bus on your computer). So, I can’t tell you for sure which will be faster.

Any size over 256MB will work with ReadyBoost, but more is better. Above 512MB won’t make much of a difference.

You write, “i open a lot of 3-10 gb word processing documents and sometimes they take longer then i would like waiting for them to open and/or save.” I assume you mean 3-10 MB :). Unfortunately, ReadyBoost probably won’t help you with this. Caching can only help when a file is opened repeatedly, and ReadyBoost works by storing frequently accessed files–but you wouldn’t recognize most of these files. Most of them will be Windows system files and application files. So, ReadyBoost will help when Windows loads your word processor application files, but it probably won’t help when you open the document itself unless you work with the same document over long periods of time. This type of caching never helps when saving files. For more information, read my ReadyBoost performance test.

Here’s my final advice: give both your SD card and your flash drive a shot, and see if it helps. Shutdown your computer, and time how long it takes your computer to start and open one of your Word docs. Then, unplug your ReadyBoost drive, shut down your computer, and time it again. Let me know whether ReadyBoost helps.