I got a new (used) machine a few months ago which is running Windows 7. I just got a 16g memory (SD) card for its card reader slot. Win7 asked me if I wanted to activate ‘ReadyBoost’. It’ll allegedly speed things up… OK, how? I looked at the local help files, I looked at Microsoft’s website, and all I could find is that it will ‘speed-up’ my machine. Which is what it told me in the first place… OK, how? What does it do? How does it do it?
MS Help files and the MS website are not at all helpful. What a surprise.
Yep, that’s exactly as helpful as the MS help stuff. And tells me exactly the same thing. What I’m asking is how the fuck does it work. On a machine level.
In a nutshell, ReadyBoost acts like a cache to store swap and code to speed up your system. It only works if a) you don’t have enough RAM to hold everything at once and b) the storage is faster than your hard drive. If you have an SSD, ReadyBoost is useless.
Faster access, but not faster throughput, so it’s used along with hard disk cache, not instead of it. See this almost seven-year-old review from Tom’s Hardware.
More RAM is better than ReadyBoost, of course, and if you keep reading until you get to the tests, they’re looking at systems with 1/2, 1, and 2 Gbytes of RAM, tiny amounts by today’s standard.
ETA: Did they really sell Vista systems with 512 MB of RAM? Or expect anyone to put it on one with that little?
The biggest problem with Vista was that MS did not set adequate standards for systems certified as compliant and many makers pushed marginal systems out the door. A lot of people bought these cheap systems to get all of Vista’s wonderful features and found that it was like buying a Porsche with a 6-ounce fuel tank.
The second biggest problem with Vista was letting people upgrade marginal systems.
The reasonable (= going to get an acceptable result) criteria were well-known to MS, but they knuckled under to Dell, Gateway and others in letting underpowered systems get certified.
Read Sailor’s link (which has a quite lucid overview). Look up the detail of any part of that for yourself. Post some sort of specific response stating where you’re getting stuck
When a modern OS like Windows runs out of memory, instead of saying “OOPS OUT OF MEMORY” and crashing, it starts writing portions of memory to the hard drive. This is called cacheing.
Windows decides where to put the cache automatically, unless you go into the settings and tell it where to put it. Unless you know what you’re doing you don’t need to mess with these settings.
The cache is much slower than actual memory, but it allows a computer with less memory to perform tasks they otherwise couldn’t. Readyboost will use a flash memory card for this, if the memory card is fast enough. It will check the card to see if it is fast enough and reject it if it is not. It doesn’t replace the regular cache, though. You really don’t want to run Windows without the cache.
Opinion:If you plan to use the memory card as a memory card, do not use it for readyboost. Flash memory is great, but it does have a finite number of read/write cycles and something like this is just going to cause it to reach that limit a lot faster.
I did read the link. It’s a nice short, concise overview of what disk cacheing and page-framing is. Which I’ve known about since the '70s. So it wasn’t helpful. My question was specific. What, exactly, does ‘Readyboost’ do? How does it do it? The details. I already know the general idea.
No, it is an explanation of what ReadyBoost is and does and how it works. Did you really read it? It is about ReadyBoost, not about something which existed back in the '70s.
Let’s see.
It seems like it caches disk content.
Let us read further.
What more do you want? What exactly do you not understand? What specific questions do you have? Describing how the electrons move along the bus lines is useless and does not help understand anything. If I say “I walked three blocks up the street to get a gallon of milk” it does not help if I make a lengthy description of every foot movement that took me to the store and of the process of manufacturing a plastic jug and 2% milk. You just get lost in details which cloud the issue.
The Wikipedia article is quite clear for someone with a background knowledge of the basics of computers, which you say you have, and basic reading comprehension. If you have specific questions about specific points then ask them but I do not think we can write a more detailed article for you here than what Wikipedia already has.
ReadyBoost speeds up disk operations by caching disk content to flash memory.
Yes but “how”?
What do you mean how? How does it read? How does it write? Can you be specific in your question? Because just asking “how” feels like when kids learn they can answer anything they’re told with “why” and carry on like that asking “why” until a parent gets fed up and smacks them.
Windows will notice that it is reading the same thing (for example, when you start your computer you might almost always start Photoshop). In the background, if you have a ReadyBoost device configured, Windows will copy the file to there, since it the total time to read it from flash is less than disk (disk probably has a higher transfer rate, but also a slower access time to get ready to read the disk).
The next time that program is called for, Windows will look to make sure the ReadyBoost device is still present and the file still cached, and will read it from flash.
If you stop using Photoshop because you switched to some other image manipulation program, or if you use something else more frequently, ReadyBoost will remove the Photoshop files and pre-load that.
“Hybrid hard drives” which are old-time disks that also have some on-board flash memory, do the same thing. But since the drive doesn’t know about files, only disk blocks, it may not do as good a job as Windows could. Or it could do a better job (since Windows will cache the whole file, even if part is never used). Also, caching writes is safer on the hybrid drive because the flash and the drive can’t be separated. Windows (7 at least, not sure about Vista) doesn’t really want to cache write data on a ReadyBoost drive because if the user removes it or it fails, it has no way to promote that data back to the hard drive.
For security reasons, ReadyBoost rebuilds its cache upon reboot. Also, ReadyBoost works at the sector level. There are actually a bunch of different technologies intermingling to create the effect you are talking about.
This article from Microsoft Technet will describe all the relevant technolgies better, as well as provide a much more detailed answer to the OP’s question.
If you already know the general idea of disk cache, the answer is: ReadyBoost uses a USB memory device as another level of disk cache for Windows, slower than RAM cache but faster than (spinning) disk access. Maybe you’re confused because Microsoft picked a fancy trademarked name for it?
BTW this should go without saying, but if your computer has an SSD (or a SSD-assisted spinning HD), ReadyBoost is entirely useless as your existing SSD is almost certainly already faster than the USB bus.