What SD cards are compatible with ReadyBoost on Vista

Factual Questions
1

I want to get an 8 or 16GB SD card to use as extra storage, but I also want to use it for the readyboost function to see if it speeds things up.

I currently have a Patriot 8GB USB drive that I don’t want to keep in my PC 24/7 and a Sandisk 2GB microSD card in an SD adapter that I normally keep in my camera. The Sandisk card doesn’t work for readyboost on my computer (it works fine for data storage though), but for some reason the Sandisk 2GB card works on a desktop which is running Windows 7, just not on my laptop. I don’t want to spend $15-30 on an SD card and find out it doesn’t work for readyboost.

Are Kingston cards ready boost compatible with Vista?

2

Take a look at Is your flash drive fast enough for Vista's ReadyBoost? | ZDNET

3

There’s no real reason to use readyboost. RAM prices are so low that any money spent on a card is wasted. Just buy more RAM.

4

Windows isn’t going to pre-load your programs into RAM. To load anything into RAM, you still have to get it off the slow hard drive… which is where ReadyBoost comes in.

SD prices are really low too, anyway.

5

[ul]
[li]Four GB RAM card (total 8 GB onboard) for current computer from crucial.com is $149.99.[/li][li]SanDisk SDHC Ultra II - 32 GB - $88.00.[/li][/ul]

Granted, it’s mixing apples and bicycles for comparison. But it’s cost effective just to compare.

6

I can’t get crucial to work for some reason, but I am maxed out on RAM. I have a laptop that has 2 slots, each of which can only hold 1GB of RAM and I already have those filled with 1GB sticks.

However I don’t remember what the specs are of RAM I have (CL, etc). But I already have 2GB, so I can’t add more and I don’t know if buying higher speed RAM would make a difference.

8GB SD cards start at about 12 & S/H, and 16GB cards are about 23 & S/H. Plus I could use the extra storage anyway.

7

I’m not sure readyboost would help you much. It was more of a crutch for older computers with far too little RAM and slooow hard drives. Instead of thrashing the hard drive, readyboost preloads some data on the flash drive and uses it as swap space. Here’s a quick benchmark that concludes readyboost can help a very slow older laptop, but does jack squat for anything with moderate computing power. Wiki has some more about when readyboost can help performance.

Getting “faster” RAM probably wouldn’t help either. The difference between the cheap generic stuff and the highest rated, lowest latency, most expensive stuff is not noticeable unless you run the right specialized benchmarks.

8

>Windows isn’t going to pre-load your programs into RAM.

That’s absolutely not true. Windows does a shit ton of caching. All readyboost does is help those with very low ram situations by having a page file on a different volume that might be faster than the hard drive Windows is running on.