Windows Ready Boost

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I have inserted two different flash drive cards into my card ready one was 4GB and the other was 8GB and both say the same thing. See attached is there something that I am missing here in using the ReadyBoost?

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As tested, the card cannot reach the sustained transfer speed required to make ReadyBoost benefit your system. If you format the card to NTFS (if it’s currently FAT32), you may find that on retest Windows will allow them to be used.

Be aware however that you may not notice an improvement in speed; some people find a performance increase (often with slow PC’s), others say they find no benefit from using ReadyBoost.

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I concur. Ready Boost does not affect Win 7 nearly as much as the older OS’s. It’s far easier to tweak Windows 7 to increase speed. Check here: http://www.howtogeek.com/tag/windows-7/ for numerous ways to personalize and tweak Windows 7. I have read that you need to use specialized high speed thumb drives to operate Ready Boost.

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Thanks Ted and Andy and welcome to the lounge too.
I have been reading up on it as well and have decided to leave well enough alone. After I did what I needed to do See my post “Windows XP to Windows 7 Ultimate” this thing is running better than it ever has.
Thanks for the “How to Geek” Ted

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I don’t have too much confidence in the whole”ready boost” thing.
I think if you have to use ready boost, Get yourself a memory usb stick that
can handle the transfer speeds needed to make it actually worth using.

Otherwise an upgrade in your system RAM will go a far longer way in speeding up your computer.

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I don’t have too much confidence in the whole”ready boost” thing.
I think if you have to use ready boost, Get yourself a memory usb stick that
can handle the transfer speeds needed to make it actually worth using.

Otherwise an upgrade in your system RAM will go a far longer way in speeding up your computer.

Ultimately it really depend on how you plan to use your computer. As far as the best “Ready Boost” device goes I generally go with an SD card because of the way it sits in my computer but, my friend John uses (or at least used) a memory stick. I don’t think there’s much difference overall. Moving on, if you have the RAM the only time you need to use ready boost is if you’re like me and run so many task that even Win 7 has trouble keeping up (I’ve used 95, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, and 7 and 7 is by far the best at memory management). However, it should also be mentioned that while “Ready Boost” is nowhere near as good as actually having more RAM it is much cheaper (I have PC6400 in my laptop which is fairly standard and it would probably cost me at least $70 to switch my 1 Gig card to a 2 Gig thus putting me at my max of 4 GB.)

Edit: I’ve noticed multiple post saying to use NTFS but, I use FAT (Especially since I use to switch the card between my camera and my computer). As far as using a flash drive I personally wouldn’t advise it, especially not with laptops. This is for two reasons: 1.) Flash drives tend to be slower (to my understanding at least) than SD Cards and Memory Sticks. 2.) If you’re carrying you laptop around (like so many of us do) then you may accidentally lose your flash drive mid transfer (usually via wall). Then again, as far as leaving your flash drive in mid-transfer I tend to advise against it anyway.

Finally, I realize that I’m babbling a bit more than usual today, so I ask forgiveness if my post doesn’t make as much sense as I intended it to.

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Intel X25 solid state drive will do the most to speed up a system boot and operations. It will also cost the most.

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I am curious about the rationale for formatting the flash memory as NTFS. It was my understanding that these things were usually just FAT, and that the efficiencies associated with NTFS apply only to way in which the data is stored on a spinning drive.

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@peterg, NTFS (and ExFAT) is not as limited in terms of file sizes as are FAT, FAT16 and FAT32 (500Mb, 2Gb and 4Gb), as ReadyBoost can then use the full space on the USB or SD card.

My experience installing 7 on netbooks shows that the install is much faster from a USB drive formatted with NTFS than on the same stick formatted with FAT32. I’ve also formatted non-ReadyBoost sticks from FAT32 and found them to work fine with ReadyBoost afterwards.

I think that NTFS has changed slightly in the last few years, perhaps also the drivers used by 7 are better, too.

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Thanks for the explanation – I had forgotten about the maximum memory accessed, and had my mind on access times. I get confused about the true nature of these things, and need an education in such esoteric matters.

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Well, for giggles I went down and bought a PNY flash drive that stated that it was Ready Boost capable. I stuck it in and clicked on the appropriate item and got the same message that I posted earlier.
I really don’t need another flash drive but nothing ventured nothing gained.

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After going to the properties of my memory stick formatted in NTFS I also got the same result, but I clicked on the retest button and suddenly it was working.
Made no difference to win7 speed though, but with 8GB ram did not expect it to.

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I stuck the flash drive in and reformatted to NTFS then reset, and it came up good to go. Did it make any difference? Well it is too early to tell, and I have only had one cup of coffee, but I did notice that Outlook opened up faster.
Will keep an eye on this.

HP Pavilion dv5000 CTO Notebook
2GB RAM
2GB RAM (Ready Boost)
2.4 AMD Turion64 Processor

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24 hours later after the insertion of a Ready Boost Flash Drive, and I am impressed. Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro was one program that seemed to take forever to open. Now it opens extremely fast. Less than 5 seconds from the start menu w/o using an existing document. Opening an existing document was close to that as well. Yes I did time these and this is totally unscientific.
Printing to an asleep Lexmark Prevail 705 Pro printer was another go get a cuppa coffee program. Also sped this up.
My advice to anyone that is toying with trying the ready boost, is if your computer is older such as mine is (3 years), go for it. Remember though to format the flash drive to NTFS.
And last but not least, the cards in solitaire flew off the screen this morning. Anyone got a spare Ace of Spades?

HP Pavilion dv5000 CTO Notebook
2GB RAM
2GB RAM (Ready Boost)
2.4 AMD Turion64 Processor

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t8ntlikly, I pleased you’re having such good results with ReadyBoost 🙂

Now that we know you’re using a laptop, it’s easier to speculate on how it’s helping; laptop hard drives are almost always way slower than their desktop equivalents, anything that will take the strain from the HDD will help.

I wonder if your power settings affect it? Do you get similar speed increases plugged and unplugged?

I’ve since read that many people have reportedly made their Flash drives ReadyBoost useable by formatting NTFS and using compression …

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Andy,
For Follow Up
I have been running on battery and wirelessly for the past 24 hours or so and I don’t see any difference in the speed unplugged vs. plugged in.

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That’s a good result all round then

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I believe Readyboost will help speed up the launch of applications (or, at least, that is where it is most noticeable) but the application launches that it helps most are the ones frequently used.

I had asked a question a couple days ago about the location of the stored results of the Readyboost test results. The OS only tests a flash chip to determine if it meets the minimum speeds for Readyboost. If you have several chips, as I have from my cameras, it is worthwhile looking up the Readyboost speed test results to determine the fastest chip. A faster chip will no doubt, deliver Readyboost advantages (to whatever extent they exist) better than a slower chip. The Readyboost test only performs the test once and, if the chip passes, it is never retested – unless you reformat it.

To see the test results and to be certain the results apply to the chip you are testing, format the chip then look at the results as described by Group Moderator Gerald in his response to my question.

“You can see the logs by going to Control Panel>Administrative Toosl>Event Viewer>Applications and Service Logs>Microsoft>Windows>ReadyBoost>Operational>

On the right panel click ‘find’ and type in ‘speed’ to see the speed test results. You can also look at all the logged ReadyBoost events in ‘Operational’.”

The results show both random read speed and write speed. By that they mean ‘random’ locations on the chip. Some chips have a high speed buffer that allows them to be classed at some very high speed but they may still be unacceptable for Readyboost. I believe their tests are done on relatively small file sizes since that is the type of data Readyboost is designed to speed up. Serial access to large files on disk is already very fast so Readyboost doesn’t attempt to speed up that kind of access.

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