Having been using an Asus A7Jc since the last quarter of 2006 (having got rid of the old Samsung) and running Windows Vista since day one (pre-RC1 (build 5536), RC1 (build 5600), RC2 (build 5744) and now the released retail version (build 6000)), even the foresight of maxing out the “laptop” (as a 17″ widescreen tipping 4kg on the scales, it’s a desktop replacement really) to a generous 2 GiB of RAM, still isn’t quite enough considering how I abuse hardware via the dark art of multitasking. :P
As fully solid state drives are still extortionately expensive and/or don’t have the capacity of traditional magnetic platter harddrives, Vista allows the usage of compatible flash memory (like those used in USB thumbdrives or digital camera storage cards) to work alongside SuperFetch to improve system performance by using the flash memory to cache data that are typically small in size and would be randomly read from the harddisk.
Why is this? Whilst even the slow harddisk like those found in laptops would beat even the fastest commercial flash memory in sustained read and write speeds, flash memory access latency is typically 10 to 100 times faster by virtue of not having to wait from the data to come full circle on rotating platters, so when data is access is tonnes of random read/writes… flash memory has the upper hand.
For the average person using Vista, ReadyBoost is most obvious when enabled on systems with tiny physical RAM of under 1 GiB (Vista’s minimum requirement is 512 MiB) where the performance improvement approaches 50% faster! Systems with larger physical memories will see a sharper drop off in improvements less you happen to be one of those evil bastards (like me) that hammer a system close to or beyond available physical RAM.
So what about my experiences with ReadyBoost? Well, whilst I do have a thumbdrive and USB flash card reader… I really didn’t like the idea of having a system enhancement that dangled off a laptop (though by design, ReadyBoost will gracefully deactivate itself should the flash device fail and/or removed accidentally) so took advantage of the integrated SD/MMC/MS-PRO flash card reader where I could stick any one of the acceptable cards flush into the slot. ;)
Whilst the price differential between a 2 GiB and 4 GiB SD flash card was minimal, the recommended ratio between flash and real memory is 1:1. As I “only” have 2 GiB of physical RAM, I chose the former and in anycase, ReadyBoost actually compresses the cached data to a ratio of 2:1, so a 2 GiB will store roughly 4 GiB of data! Oh and the cache is encrypted with 128bit AES, which is as strong as the default encryption available with Vista’s EFS (per file/directory encryption) or BitLocker (full drive encryption), so wouldn’t have to worry about people snooping into one’s data should they get hold of said flash-cache.
After poking about on various online shops, I opted for a 2 GiB Transcend TS2GSD150 with superficially fit all the requirements for ReadyBoost. On receiving the goods and plugging it into the slot, Vista’s autoplay dialogue popped up and plumbed for the “Speed up my computer using Windows ReadyBoost” option.
Disappointingly, the tests came back saying the device was not up too the job, even with a few clicks in the properties tab to get Vista to retest the device. Figuring that the integrated card reader might be the bottle neck, I decided to full format the card using FAT32 and on checking the property pages, see that the card was now suitable for ReadyBoost! Wooh!
I can only guess that the default FAT16 formatted card was something that didn’t agree with ReadyBoost (formatting as just FAT will be FAT12 or FAT16. In any case, FAT32 is a more robust filesytem of the 3 and is the only way to make use of cards that are larger than 2 GiB, so this should always be the first choice for ReadyBoost.
Why not NTFS you ask? Whilst ReadyBoost does support Microsoft’s (as of Vista) transactional filesystem, it has too much overhead for such usage and is ill suited to the architecture of NAND flash anyway. In an ideal world, Microsoft would have added NAND specific filesystem support (akin the Opensourced JFFS2 or YAFFS) for ReadyBoost, eliminating the square-peg-round-hole situation as current.
Is the difference noticeable? So far, things look good… having let things cache for a while, one thing that annoyed me in Firefox when switching to Flash and/or AJAX laden pages if a 30-something second lag where the browser does jack-shit plus a lot of disk thrashing (not helped by the fact I have around 250 tabs open across 6 windows… parallel web-browsing at its finest!) are reduced to a mere couple of seconds and minimal disk thrashing! Wooh!
Even better though is for those of you guys and gals that are buying a cutting edge laptop this latter half of 2007 as ReadyBoost’s sister feature, ReadyDrive can be made use of by laptop featuring hybrid harddrives (traditional platter harddrive but with integrated NAND cache) or system platforms like Intel’s Santa Rosa with Robson technology without the need to attach dangly bits to one’s laptop and/or use up an integrated flash reader slot! :D
