Vista Boost ?

[Belles_Toaster]

Hello to all. I recently plugged my ATP 150X 2gb SD card via an a card adapter to my vista pc. It politely asked me if it could use the open space to speed up its memory. (The led indicates non-stop a activity) I tried this with my smaller Kingston 1gb usb 2.0 stick and it said that it tested it and found it not fast enough. Since Cosair is offering V-Boost sticks of 1gb 2gb and 4gb capacity is there a sweet point? Although there is no cure like having more true system memory my understanding this is to speed up swapping between the system and the hard drives when they have to seek out really small files of <4 kbs ie speeding up random reads. Would this burnout the flash memory faster? or would a dedicated stick be better assuming its built for this stress? Certain activity has sped up a bit and it seems a useful tweak. Thanks

 

[Mondoman]

Your flash memory should have a lifetime warranty, so I wouldn't worry about it burning out. Not sure if you had any other questions in there...

 

[ethel]

It should be fine - flash memory does have a limited number of cycles, but it would be a long while before it happened - and a 20GB stick will probably be $10 then.

 

[HYST3R]

you would see more performance out of an actual stick of ram as opposed to a flash stick because its going through USB 2.0. Data tranfer rates are much faster with RAM vs USB 2.0.

but using it the way you are now is not bad. your flash stick should be fine. i wouldnt use it as a permanent solution tho.

 

[jackluo923]

Watch out the readyboost memory though if you're using 32bit operating system. 32 bit system can't address more than 4GB of memory. So if you have 2GB of physical Ram, you should only able to get 1 -1.5 GB for the readyboost memory.

 

[Mondoman]

jl- you might want to do some research on that before posting. The 4GB memory addressing limit doesn't apply to devices that aren't addressed as main memory. Hard drives and USB devices are not addressed as main memory, so no such limit.
Here's a good article: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/03/VistaKernel/default.aspx#top

 

[jackluo923]

According to the website you've given above, it didn't mention anything related to memory addressing limit.
The closest thing is

device is between 256MB and 32GB in size

You can use 4gb maximum for the readyboost function, but can you actually use all of the 4 GB (uncompressed) if your computer already have like 2GB physical ram installed? I've read in this forum that virtual memory in windows xp is part of 4gb memory addressing limit ( what i mean is everything including the physical RAM, video ram, virtual ram and all the memory addressing must be within the 4gb limit.). And isn't readyboost another form of virtual memory, but instead it uses flashdrive instead of hard drive.

 

[Mondoman]

...
You can use 4gb maximum for the readyboost function, but can you actually use all of the 4 GB (uncompressed) if your computer already have like 2GB physical ram installed?

Yes. My notebook running Vista Home Premium has 2GB of RAM and fills up the 4GB flash drive assigned to ReadyBoost.

I've read in this forum that virtual memory in windows xp is part of 4gb memory addressing limit

Yes, that's pretty much required by the definition of virtual memory.

... And isn't readyboost another form of virtual memory, but instead it uses flashdrive instead of hard drive.

No, it's not virtual memory; it's more like a disk cache.