Ready Boost -- Yea or Neah?

[agoodfella]

Has anyone had good (or bad) experiences enabling Ready Boost?

I have a few questions:

- What happens if you have enabled Ready Boost and you decide to unplug your USB memory? Will this cause havoc to your system?

- What is the minimum amount of memory you should use to see a meaningful difference?

- Are there certain read/write speeds you need to have (i.e. will this work on a SD card? will this work with a Seagate FreeAgent USB external hard drive?)

Thanks

[cluberti]

Have a read - I've found that on systems with 1GB or memory or less, USB and fast SD cards do make a difference, but when my boxes have 2GB or more it seems to matter very little that readyboost is enabled.

[Polarman]

Another recent article here:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2160

It's basicly the same results. No real improvement.

[razormoon]

@cluberti

How can you tell the difference? I have 1gb base, added a 512mb usb and it seems to run the same....if not slower at times?

Hmm...that was on my old machine. Let me post back since I have not tested on new.

Edited October 21, 2007 by razormoon

[cluberti]

I track load times on apps and file system reads/writes via perfmon, and file copies with a vbscript - I've noticed that a machine with 1GB of RAM or less (especially 512MB) seems to perform noticeably better in these tests than boxes with 2GB or more (1.5GB seems to depend a lot on hardware - some machines benefit, and some do not).