In today’s episode of “Arn’t we a special person”, I’d like to point out this post (Thanks to Paul for sending me the link).
I forget who the original genius was that figured this out (I heard about it well before December), but in any case - Matt_Rajca and others are offering a practically useless “performance” tip.
First of all - ReadyBoost is one of Microsoft’s new features for Vista. It’s meant to speed up read operations from disk. So, if you try to open an application, or something like that - it can be pulled from a faster source. The end result, is that your programs start faster, and other things (like, say loading a file from your browser’s cache, or a search index, etc) can be done faster.
Now, Because ReadyBoost is meant to speed things up - there’s a few limits that Microsoft have placed on the drive that you can use for a ReadyBoost cache. In short: It needs to be fast. Really fast. If it’s slow, then there’s no point having it. After all, if it takes you just as long to read from the ReadyBoost cache, as it does from your hard drive - you’ve achieved exactly nothing (assuming you don’t actually slow things down, but placing additional demands on a slow/busy device).
This technique that Matt Rajca explains could, possibly, be useful. Like, if the USB Flash Memory stick that you purchased, is just slightly too slow. That’s a fairly limited circumstance though - most of the people that read those articles seem to think that you can achieve an improvement by using a USB Hard Drive, MP3 Player, or a generic USB Thumb Drive and achieve some improvements.
So, now we’ll see a bunch of people saying “ReadyBoost isn’t worth it - I didn’t notice any improvement”. Actually, no wait… there’s already two or three posts like that.
Someone going by the handle “Shifted” writes:
“Thanks for this nick very usefull [sic] even though I’m not entirely sure what this does, I notice no difference in performance while using my 2 gig ipod nano.”
Yeah, that’s because your ReadyBoost cache is no faster than your hard drive.
(Hint: Your iPod Nano isn’t using the fastest flash memory around , plus, it’s got an OS in the way that’s fiddling with your read/write requests) .
Brilliance Factor: Just like Paula Bean.
