ReadyBoost Experiences?

[hkelley]

I am curious about anyone's experience using ReadyBoost and if they have experienced a ThinkPad performance improvement.

Also, are there any thoughts about whether ReadyBoost is having a postive effect on extending battery life by reducing HD spins.

[warder]

On my z60m it appears to be a complete waste of time for these reasons:

- driver problem - the PC slows down writing to a 133x SD card on the internal slot (PCI bus) Basically the driver blocks windows and so the system doesn't smoothly write the data - you can see things stall

- power drainer - it appears that on resuming a hibernate, the entire pagefile is refreshed to the SD card. This drains lots of battery and takes a few minutes to do.

I like the concept, but it certainly doesn't help me. Perhaps an updated Ricoh SD driver might help... time will tell.

[hkelley]

On the other hand I have had excellent success with ReadyBoost using a 1 gb USB 2.0 flash memory stick. I first re-formatted the stick, stuck it in the USB port, Vista asked if I wanted to improve my performance. I said "yes." And, it did.

I have noticed a considerable performance boost with a 4gb stick with a 32 mb/s read speed.

I believe I am getting the battery benefit of fewer HD spins but not sure I can prove it.

[kulivontot]

eliminating HD spins on vista is impossible. There are so many random reads/writes that various vista services access in the background, that your drive will NEVER spin down. Readyboost also does not help this all that much as it is a write-through cache, meaning the data exists on both the flash drive and the hard disk, making it provide no benefit for write operations. For reducing power consumption, this is not a viable solution as the USB subsystem is very poorly controlled by power management (especially with el-cheapo usb keys that don't support many of the sleep states). For performance purposes, however, readyboost is pretty good. I have experienced snappier performance by having an additional 256 MB or 1GB readyboost caches available. In the past the HDD might grind for a bit before opening up my outlook e-mail or an unused program, but now I can context switch between a number of applications a lot easier. Overall, the general responsiveness of the system is improved with readyboost. I am truly excited to see more flash memory caches used in the future with Intel Robson and hybrid hard drives.

[tomh009]

On my z60m it appears to be a complete waste of time for these reasons:

- driver problem - the PC slows down writing to a 133x SD card on the internal slot (PCI bus) Basically the driver blocks windows and so the system doesn't smoothly write the data - you can see things stall.

If that's using the built-in SD slot, it's a non-starter. Performance is much worse with that than with a USB connection -- same deal as with the CF slot on my X31. You can use either a USB connection with a memory key that sticks out, or get a CardBus CF/SD reader to keep the memory internal to the case.

[warder]

That's so annoying!

The internal SD slot would be such a neat solution. It's on a faster bus too (PCI over USB) so should be better.

No unsightly add-ins, it would be neat.

Perhaps Lenovo will put future internal card readers on the USB bus if Vista has better support for that.

[tomh009]

I know ... I like the concept of the internal card readers, but the performance is not good. At least on someone's X41 the SD performance was well below the USB readers.

And on my X31 the CF is worse. Not only is it (very!) slow, but, like yours, it repeatedly freezes Windows for a few moments at a time when it's reading data off the card. Very frustrating!

The bus is fast, but either the hardware or the driver implementation for the card readers cut some corners and the result is not happy ...

[PointZero]

Would a benchmarking program be able to note any performance increase with ReadyBoost?

[rvacha]

Maybe... For fun I tried running the Windows Experience Index test with and without ReadyBoost plugged in and it benchmarked the drive the same either way. Perhaps the benchmark doesn't take ReadyBoost into consideration or perhaps it doesn't help much in my situation. My configuration is a T60 Core Duo with 1.5GB of RAM and a 60GB 7200RPM drive so my system is rather well endowed and may not gain from ReadyBoost. Flash drive is a Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 2GB which runs average speeds for a flash drive. The current flash drives are not optimized for the way that ReadyBoost does reads and writes. I think we can expect drives spefically designed for Vista that will result in a marked improvement in responsiveness. The numbers for those interested:

Processor - 4.7
Memory - 4.5
Graphics - 4.5
Gaming Grpahics - 3.8 (video is an X1400)
Hard Disk - 4.7

[wallybear]

I have installed Vista RC1 on my T60. See my specs in the signature area.

I have used a 512MB USB flash drive and a 1GB SD card in a PC Card adapter. In both cases, the improvement in "apparent responsiveness and program switching" (that is, no real benchmarks) was noticable and welcome. Vista is slow on a machine with only 1GB of RAM (similar to an XP machine with 512MB). The ReadyBoost feature improves the disk access factor of the operating system by adding a write-through cache on the flash drive. Neat and simple. If your flash drive is too slow, Vista won't allow its use. In fact, to my surprise, I experienced this with two of my USB drives (a 1GB Verbatim and a 2GB SanDisk with U3).

The reason for this failure of some drives is that typically you'll find that rather slow flash memory is used in "budget" USB drives in the 1GB to 2 GB range. These drives use a small amount of fast memory with buffers writing and reading to a larger amount of rather slow memory. So, don't assume that just any drive will do....in fact, I read that there is a move to "qualify" flash drives for use with Vista. I expect we'll see this start appearing on packaging in the coming months.

One more comment: the apparent speed improvement was about the same whether I used the 512 or the 1GB drive. This makes me think that even a relatively small drive or card is helpful. In fact, Vista supports the use of a 256MB drive for ReadyBoost.

I hope this information is helpful to someone.

[hkelley]

Vista recommends a flash drive equal to or greater than the resident RAM...the larger the better and the faster the better. It pays to look at the specs of a new flash drive before purchasing because these drives are not created equally. Size should not be the sole determining factor.

But, there is no doubt in my mind that ReadyBoost is an excellent aid in promoting greater machine performance and this is especially true with laptops.

[Saml01]

readyboost is a waste of time, marketed solely to people who dont know anything about computers. it is slow, and is a waste of flash memory. Flash memory also has a read/write limit, and using flash as readyboost continually will kill it eventually. Did I mention its slow? oh yea, flash any way you slice it is a lot slower then ram and even slower then a harddrive limited by its bus and inherent limitations of its memory chips.

Next thing you know microsoft is gonna sell in house memory called "readyboost memory" or some [censored]. Kudos to them if they do and cash in on it.

[fbrdphreak]

See here:
http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=46

[hkelley]

See here:
http://www.lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=46

In all fairness this is about ReadyDrive and not ReadyBoost. They are similar technologies but different implementations. While both are designed to improve performance they do it differently. ReadyBoost is based on using an external USB flash drive memory stick to provide caching services.

[fbrdphreak]

Ah my bad, got the terms confused.