is readyboost worth it ?

[ElectroBrocoli]

hi, recently i got interested in readyboost and i wanna try it for my pc, but before that im gonna ask an question, is it worth it ? now im using an cruzer blade by sandisk which is cheap, now if i got 2 gb of ddr3 ram, will it affect my performance ?

[NineEyeRon]

I recall looking into this back when SSDs were expensive but I chose to invest in more SSDs instead of HDDs and therefore didn’t need to look into ReadyBoost further.

 

What is your storage situation that you want to apply readyboost to?

[Kilrah]

It would only be useful with a very high performance USB drive, and buying one of those is pretty much more expensive than buying an SSD nowadays...

[RageTester]

RAM is for sure better. Using Ready boost with usb 2.0 flash drive might be worse than regular pagefile on HDD...

[Levent]

Nope, readyboost was a gimmick and the actual cases where it helped are extremely limited. It uses a dedicated USB flash drive as a swap/pagefile location. 

[whm1974]

19 minutes ago, Levent said:

Nope, readyboost was a gimmick and the actual cases where it helped are extremely limited. It uses a dedicated USB flash drive as a swap/pagefile location. 

I never used it as I been using SSDs since I built my current rig in mid 2013. I also use Linux mostly anyway.

[NineEyeRon]

29 minutes ago, Levent said:

Nope, readyboost was a gimmick and the actual cases where it helped are extremely limited. It uses a dedicated USB flash drive as a swap/pagefile location. 

Windows Vista and cheap 5400RPM HDD, that’s probably the use case back when I last looked into ReadyBoost!

[Intergalacticbits]

I'm just curious does anybody know if readyboost would help an older windows 10 laptop in any significant way that only had 4GB of ram?

 

 

I tried it once many years ago on an old vista desktop but I didn't like the way my games looked on it while using it back then.

 

[whm1974]

27 minutes ago, Intergalacticbits said:

I'm just curious does anybody know if readyboost would help an older windows 10 laptop in any significant way that only had 4GB of ram?

 

 

I tried it once many years ago on an old vista desktop but I didn't like the way my games looked on it while using it back then.

 

Does Windows 10 even support Readyboost now? SSDs are a lot cheaper then they were back when Vista came out... Hell there even wasn't any Consumer Level ones back then...

[ElectroBrocoli]

15 hours ago, Levent said:

Nope, readyboost was a gimmick and the actual cases where it helped are extremely limited. It uses a dedicated USB flash drive as a swap/pagefile location. 

okay then, well i could buy an 3.0 drive but nyeh i'll better buy ram thx mate

[RejZoR]

Microsoft could repurpose ReadyBoost to allow caching on internal drives and make it so it doesn't scrap the data from last session and you'd basically have PrimoCache functionality built into Windows. Instead they left the thing to rot in it's useless form. It was useless when it was relevant and it's still useless today. Just buy PrimoCache if you want acceleration through caching. It makes a huge difference, but you'll have to use internal SSD for that. You can try using on USB, but only if it's USB 3.0 or something.

 

There is also eBoostr, which works on a file system level so you can actually exclude files from being cached and you can do it through USB or internal drives. It should still work though it hasn't been updated for years. Costs the same as PrimoCache.

 

These tools, including ReadyBoost are really to accelerate reading from HDD, not as RAM replacement. If you have empty slots, get more RAM if you can. There is no replacement for more RAM. For HDD, you either buy an SSD for SATA and straight replace it. Or you go the route of caching which should really be used when you want to have massive storage capacities but don't want to spend 500€ on massive SSD.

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to Storage Devices