Psuedo Hybrid Drive

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Ben-8151

I am planning a Vista64 Home Premium build and have a few questions about
increasing the performance of the OS. Due to the lack of availability of
3.5" Hybrid Desktop Hard Drives I am looking at the ReadyBoost feature of
Vista. Obviously a Hybrid drive would cache data to allow better use of the
SATA bus by bursting the data at high speed. I am trying to figure out if I
can substitue another media for this funciton. From what I have read
ReadyBoost is a mechanism to move or distribute the pagefile/virtual memory
to a secondary storage device.

I found a vague article
"http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/12428141-2e4c-43ab-8dd2-a6ed6e3b87761033.mspx"
which references removable storage devices and mentions USB drives several
times. It also mentioned setting the ReadyBoost size to 1.5 times the
physical ram (typical windows managed pagefile size), which I think it is
moving the pagefile.

My questions are:
1. Is ReadyBoost limited to USB drives? Could a seconday drive in the
computer be used for this feature, like mapping the pagefile to another drive
to free the OS drive from the I/O load. More importantly can I use my SATA
RAM drive which has 0.1ms seek time and 152 MB/sec transfer rate across the
drive space?
2. Does ReadyBoost provide the same benefit as a Hybrid drive in terms of
boot up performance.
3. Can anyone validate my belief that ReadyBoost is just a pagefile mounted
to another drive to releive the main drive of the I/O load
4. At what point would allocating space to an external storage device be
un-beneficial? If it is just a pagefile, then I know the answer.

A better understanding of the two mechanisms will help me decide what
hardware to put in my upcoming computer.

Thank You in Advance!
 
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