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ReadyBoost – USB Keys for PageFile in Vista

Autor brendon

Windows Vista has some great new functions built into it: ReadyBoost, Desktop Search, BitLocker, Domain Fast User Switching. Just to name a few. I have been running the Windows Vista Beta’s since BETA II in production on my laptop and PC at home. I am definitely looking forward to getting my hands on the RTM.

The logic behind ReadyBoost is that modern Flash Drives (USB Thumb Drives) have a faster read/ write throughput than a standard spinning disk. So to reduce load on the disk, the commonly accessed information from the page file or frequently used programs are loaded into the flash drive. 

I have previously read that average drive IO is about 1Mbit/s where you can get some flash drives with upwards or 14Mbit/s read and 24Mbit/s write. So with Vista build 5600 on my laptop (P 1.4M x86, 1GB RAM & 60GB HDD) I commonly run IE, VPC, Outlook 2007 I have dedicated a Kingston Elite 2GB USB Key (24r/14w MBit/s) and didn’t really notice any immediate improvement.

Only when I left the key at home one day, running normally without was I amazed at how much slower the system ran. I’m sure if I was running a x64, 4GB RAM, 10’000RPM disks I would not notice the difference however to run Vista on older hardware using disk intensive programs like VPC or Even just Outlook 2007, there is a definite speed increase. (No I have not measured it…) 

Naturally you cannot share the same key between devices without re-configuring it. Plus having a large USB key plugged into the back of all the old PC’s presents a problem where they are likely to be mis-used or stolen. For important users/ home PC’s this is probably an easy cheep way to increase performance until the next hardware cycle. 

On a similar note, hard drive manufacturers are developing hard drives with embedded flash memory, cutting down power usage when the computer is inactive (good for laptops) and increasing performance. The Windows Vista command set is able to communicate with these new drives and use ReadyBoost to control the Flash memory.