Using ReadyBoost

Before we get to information on performance, let's first note how to make use of this feature in Vista.  Fortunately, unlike many other features in Vista, it is one that is very easy to enable.

In fact, you'll quickly know whether your drive will work with the feature upon inserting your drive on the USB port.  The Auto Play menu will pop up and if it is supported, you'll see an option there labeled "Speed up my system". 

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Clicking on this option will basically just load the drive properties menu which will allow you to activate the feature, as well as set the page file size to use.

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You'll know everything went well when you go check your flash drive.  You should see the cache file of the specified size written to the drive.  Vista will allocate this space on your flash drive for this feature and any remaining space can still be utilized.  That's where a high capacity drive will come in more handy.

Performance Overview

Testing performance of this feature is actually not that simple.  There's no real benchmark that you can use to measure the real impact it has.  However, what you should note is that what this feature really does is increase application load times and somewhat provide some "aid" to your hard drive in order to give it somewhat of a speed boost.   It is not to be confused with increasing memory performance.  That's not what it does. 

Hard disk drives usually perform quite poor in regards to random I/O speeds.  Buy using a flash drive, this will compensate for the poor performance as flash drives are significantly faster in this aspect. 

Before we get to the performance results, let's have a look at the test system specs...

It's important to note that any results you find online on ReadyBoost performance will all be somewhat inaccurate.  Why?  Well, this feature is quite difficult to test simply because the results will vary greatly due to both the components you choose for testing, as well as the flash drive you choose to use along with this feature.  I spent a significant amount of time testing this feature in order to at least provide you all with some credible results that will give you an overall idea of what to expect. 

Synthetic Benchmark Tests

We start things off with the synthetic benchmark tests only because a majority will resort to such tools when attempting to capture performance differences when taking advantage of this feature in Vista. 

Note though that while synthetic benchmarking suites will indeed impact and make use of the cache file on the flash drive, none should be a determining factor on performance or benefits of even taking advantage of such a feature in the first place.  With that said, I only used a couple of benchmarks I feel are the best option if you even choose to take this route to begin with.  They are HD Tach and Sisoftware's Cache & Memory Benchmark.  Both of these benchmarks will clearly make use of the page file loaded on your flash drive.  If you want confirmation, simply focus on the flash drive itself right when you start each test.  If your flash drive has a built-in activity LED, you should see it active occasionally during a majority of these tests.  How frequent it does access the flash drive will depend on both how much memory is allocated at time of testing, as well as how much memory you have installed in your Vista machine.

Starting with HD Tach, we see absolutely no improvement at all using ReadyBoost.  Now, I ran these tests countless times under different scenarios and only came across practically the same exact results every time.  During the Burst Speed tests, this benchmark does indeed access the cache on the flash drive one or two times during the initial tests.  However, the results were identical to those without ReadyBoost enabled.

The final synthetic benchmark test that was run was Sandra's Memory & Cache benchmark.  Personally, out of all, this is the one benchmark I would run if you don't plan on taking the effort to conduct some tests that will offer more concrete results.  Again, like every single test in this article, this benchmark was run numerous times to confirm its accuracy.  In conclusion, these tests did show some improvement using ReadyBoost, all of which were minimal though.

Actual Performance Results

Where this feature will really help the most is when conducting some tests consisting mainly of boot times and application load times.  However, to achieve the best possible results, you have to somewhat take the time to have the SuperFetch feature "learn" what applications you use the most.  This requires you to start your computer a few times and is where you'll notice just what an impact your installed RAM has on your system.  You see, in order to get a better overall idea of just how ReadyBoost does manage to help, you need to learn a bit about how SuperFetch works first.  In short, SuperFetch is able to identify usage patterns and prepares commonly used applications before the user actually needs them.  The more RAM, the less frequent Vista will resort to accessing the cache file on the flash drive. 

Now, I conducted these tests many times for accuracy.  Here we do see where ReadyBoost plays a major role.  In fact, keep an eye on your flash drive and you'll see how often it has to resort to accessing the page file during any of these actions.  The biggest difference here was the restart, which shaved off roughly seven seconds.  Again, nothing too significant here but keep in mind that we ran the system with 1GB of memory, which I highly recommend you at least have when running Vista.  In fact, you won't be able to take advantage of many of its features if you don't!  That's why I decided you skip testing with only 512MB installed.  It is simply not recommended and I found it to be a waste of time to provide such results.

Final tests were conducted to measure application load times with and without ReadBoost enabled.  I decided to test using very commonly used applications, one of which is both CPU and Memory intensive.  Outlook tests were conducted with a 1.3GB PST file loaded and WMP was tested with a large 10.2GB music library.  As expected, there wasn't a significant difference here either.  It was the memory hungry Photoshop CS2 that showed the most significant change in load times.

Remember, results you'll find on the web on ReadyBoost performance should be taken lightly.  Your overall system performance plays a significant role and results will vary greatly.  For example, if you choose to pair a low performance hard drive with some budget memory modules, the results here should change drastically.

Next: Conclusions