ReadyBoost in Windows 7 – How to Use It

hardware-recmemoryreadyboostsd cardwindows 7

I've bought an SD card today for my phot frame, but when I inserted it into my notebook I saw I could use it for ReadyBoost.

Some background

I'm a .net developer, using VMs and developing web applications (and Sharepoint). I use an HP notebook machine with Core 2 Duo 2GHz + 4GB RAM + 320 7200 HD. I simultaneously run

  • Visual Studio 2010 with some plugins
  • SQL Server
  • Firefox with at least 10 tabs
  • Chrome with about 5 tabs
  • IIS
  • VM with Server 2008 machine
  • Sharepoint

and occasionally also Photoshop and some InDesign as well. So I don't let my machine have a break. 😀

Question

If I buy myself some really fast SDHC card (like SanDisk 16GB Extreme 30MB/s – is there anything faster) and use it with my Windows 7 ReadyBoost, will I see any performance gain? Is it going to work something similar to Seagate's HybridDrive Momentus with 4GB of solid state drive?

What could I actually expect if I do put this card into my machine? And what would be recommended size?

Observations

I guess redirecting page file to it would speed up the system. Some VM machines on it would probably run faster as well because they could run parallel to HD host system I guess. Am I right or wrong?

Best Answer

ReadyBoost is a reading file cache, it is not an extension of virtual memory, that is based on the fact Flash memory has effectively zero seek time to cache small files (because Flash memory is also slower at sustained write that you HDD).

What ReadyBoost also does is provide more space for the Windows Super Fetch function, if you don't have any ReadyBoost enabled device connected this will still be happening in your spare RAM; so you see best performance gains if you have a low quantity of RAM, where not using RB means the SF cache has to be dropped when the RAM is needed by software.

In response to comments on studiohack's answer:
There's no worry about syncing, it's a read cache and basically if the file's not ready in the cache Windows just pulls it from the HDD instead. As an aside also note the contents of the cache are encrypted and compressed, so your data is safe from the sudden theft of the SD card.

Bottom line, using RB won't degrade performance, so it's worth trying if you've a spare card about, but with 4GiB RAM, don't expect any serious improvements.
(Although, that doesn't stop me running 16GiB of RB with 4GiB RAM!)

My answer to ReadyBoost - How much space needed? may also prove useful.

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