KRK said:
I've just started to use readyboost by pushing a 4GB usb stick into the
port and configuring it to 'Improve system performance'. I can see its
little light flashing, so I assume it is working. Is there anyway of
measuring how much it is improving (or not) system performance. I have 2
Gb ram.
It's mostly in observed behavior. When I had a somewhat slower system with
1G RAM putting in a 2G USB key made a quite noticeable difference overall,
but especially in opening programs. I upgraded the motherboard with a
faster CPU and 2G RAM. Everyone said it wouldn't help much, if any, so
didn't bother with the USB key. Recently I put it back in specifically
because when one program ran it's cleanup process, both memory and disk
intensive, the overall system performance was quite poor and starting
programs took a long time. I recalled that the most noticeable thing
Readyboost did for me was made programs open faster. And so it did again.
The system is notably less clogged up during the clean up process and
programs open quicker, both during that and at other times. I haven't
really noticed much, if any, other improvement. I only did one timing,
opening Opera during that cleanup process. It went from ten seconds to
three.
If you want to see what it's doing, bring up the resource monitor, open the
Disk section, and sort by Read or Write to the drive. I find that the
Readboost drive is usually at the top of the list. For the aforementioned
cleanup issue, much of it's access now goes to the Readboost drive rather
than the programs data-store drive.
I suppose the performance of your hard disk system would be relevant as
well. Except for this one program, most of my computer usage is compute
bound rather than disk bound and my drives aren't all that fast (Mode 5
Ultra ATA, 7200RPM, 8MB buffer). Perhaps with faster transfer rates or a
larger on-drive buffer it wouldn't matter so much.
- Bill
