Posted: 2/26/2007 2:45:42 PM EDT
anybody tried it yet. I brought home a 4gb drive from work, but its not "fast" enough to work properly. i guess i will have to keep my eyes out for a 4gb readyboost thumb drive  |
| well i read up a little more. i think this brand got the highest "read" rating so i ordered a 2gb from newegg link i'll have it in two days |
Agreed, it can be a band-aid. However, consider the case where upgrading the RAM is prohibitively expensive (RD RAM), wasteful (using all of your RAM slots, would have to throw away your ram to upgrade) or impossible (some braindead chipset limiting you to 512 megs of ram). A cheap thumb drive can help get extra miles out of such a configuration at low risk. |
That is an excellent point. |
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ya i forgot to mention in my first post. my board has 3 memory slots. i have a 1gb stick and two 256's. im not gonna take out the 256's and have them just sit there, then have to order one of these for 88 bucks plus shipping if this does help much. im the kinda guy who won't believe anything you say untill I SEE IT (talking about readyboost performace). then i might order more memory. just not sure how much money i want to spend on a socket 754 board. using a agp slot  i hope you see what im getting at. so in other words YES this is a band aid....... from keeping me from buying a whole new system. which is not in my budget yet.  ups says it will arive on tuesday, we shall see. if it doesn't work(i'll give it a couple weeks) i'll have a high speed drive i can use for data. or maybe i'll take it to the range and practice my 300 yard thumb drive shots 
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I tried it and noticed a definite difference. I have 1gb on board and an SD slot built into my laptop. I inserted a 1gb Sandisk type II which has the faster 10/9 transfer rate. Formated it for Fat32 and it's peppier now. I was so impressed I stopped by BB today. They have a 4gb SD card with extra usb card reader for $99. Not too bad since most SD cards and thumb drives are running $20 per 1gb. I didn't pick it up though because the box didn't say what the transfer rate was. It's the regular blue style not the black but they call it HC I think for High Capacity. I passed until I got home so I could search the Sandisk site. Couldn't find the transfer rate on that model but they do recommend it for ReadyBoost. A hundread bucks for 4gb of usable ram even if it's slower than the type II or the newer now type III (compact flash) is still a pretty good bang for the buck considering the prices of sticks. It would cost like $600 for two 2gb sticks to max out my machine at 4 gb so that's a substantial savings and then I'd have two 512mb sticks laying around. From zooming around I see two problems: What's the max size drive for ReadyBoost? I couldn't find that answer. Most thumb drive manufacturers don't spec their transfer rate? I think that would be a significant question before buying one. Funny how what's old is new again. I can remember the old DOS days of creating a ram drive in memory to cache running programs. Band-aid? Yes. But it does work.
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my local best buy had a PNY 4gb windozboot ready for 39.95. im not a fan of pny stuff so i didn't buy it. maybe it was a misprint. -shrug- newegg i think has a 8gb one. but its sold out!!!! i don't there would be a size limit. but from what i've read you can only use one readyboost device. from a dell forum, when i did a search. the kingston had the fastest read speed. maybe i'll search for it again and post a link 
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the Sandisk Micro's work great. And they are small. 
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Formatting USB sticks as Fat32 is my preference as well, but its more for compatibility. That way you can use them on Linux, BSD, and Mac systems. |
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I can see where the seek time would be less when swapping to and from virtual memory, and if your virtual memory would other wise be on a drive that would try to be accesed at the same time I can where it would help but the transfer rate is slower than an EIDE drive |
got home today. installed this kingston probably the first kingston product i've owned. anything that says value ..... i typically don't buy when it comes to computers. but oh well  popped up asked if i wanted to speed up the system did yes. asked the how much space to take up on the drive. windoz recommded the whole disk, so i did so. the drive still shows up im my computer ( didn't know what to expect there) BTW i forgot to check the format of the drive before i said to use readyboost. but the drive is formatted in fat , just thought i'd throw that in.  i CAN tell a difference on the system. the first thing i did was install stalker. i ordered that from newegg at the same time, so it wasn't just the drive. installed the game, patch and fought evil dogs and bad guys for about 2.5 hours. ran great. all thats on the drive is whats called ReadyBoost.sfcache |