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David Overton's Blog » How can you improve the performance of Windows Vista with a USB drive or key - have you heard of ReadyBoost yet?
How can you improve the performance of Windows Vista with a USB drive or key - have you heard of ReadyBoost yet?

Windows Vista is no small operating system.  The additional graphics functionality, search databases and security measures all increase the amount of RAM needed to run a task.  Now of course, buying RAM is quite an easy thing to do on a personal basis, but it you have a small business with 20 people to upgrade, perhaps a simpler solution is required.

The Hard Disk - this is the normal solution used by most operating systems when you run out of RAM, but the problem is that hard disks are ssssslllllloooooooooooowwwwww when compared to RAM.  This is why "paging" as it is known is such a poor idea except when absolutely necessary.

This of course brings us to ReadyBoost - Vista needs more RAM, you and your customers can not necessarily just go and throw some RAM into each system, especially if it is a Laptop, so how does the USB key help?

Well, we can page through the USB key, meaning that it also acts just like a hard disk for those out of RAM moments.  Most sticks and some hard disks can easily do a 40MB/s sustained read thus giving you some speed benefits.  USB hard disk sticks are quite performant, which means you might get a performance improvement just from the "reads" from the USB stick versus the hard disks perhaps a 30MB/s vs a 40MB/s type speed, but this is not the killer reason to use the ReadyBoost functionality.

Think about what RAM stands for - Random Access Memory.  When does a hard disk fly - when it is streaming a large file, i.e. when it is Sequential access.  Paging from a disk often involved moving the head to a location on the disk and then reading an amount of data from the disk into memory.  If your hard disk has an 8ms seek time then you are doing well.  If we assume that reading takes 0 time, you are still limited to 125 of these operations per second.  If each read is accessing just 64KB of memory, the maths works out to be 8MB per second.  If the pages being pulled back in are just 4KB in size, the data transfer rate drops to 500KB/s.

Now think about the Random Access capabilites of a USB stick - for many you can not do 40MB/s for pure Random access, but you can get an aweful lot better than a few MB/s.  This is the killer feature of ReadyBoost.  Infact, the OS thinks about the reads and if it is a big long stream, it may ignore the USB stick and go straight to the hard disk.

For ReadyBoost to work well, ihe USB stick needs to meet certain performance requirements and this is a bit of a problem when at the moment manufacturers do not label the perf of the stick (often because they are hiding something in my personal opinion).  There is some great discussion on Tom Archer's blog on this that you are very welcome to read to learn more.

ttfn

David

Posted Thu, Jul 6 2006 7:08 AM by David Overton
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Comments

tezfair wrote re: How can you improve the performance of Windows Vista with a USB drive or key - have you heard of ReadyBoost yet?
on Thu, Jul 6 2006 1:32 PM
Im not entirely sure this a feature I would use or recomend. While there's always a need for more RAM, putting a swap file onto a removeable drive has to be asking for trouble.
For example, what happens to the page data held on the USB ram when the drive is removed? Will it BSOD windows? Could the page data on the USB be read by another PC? Is this not a security risk?

Unless im very unlucky flash drives tend to fail on a regular basis, so how can flash be considered to be as robust as regular memory?

As the price of RAM is getting less, RAM speed is getting faster and that SATA drive speeds are getting quicker and cache memory getting higher could this just be a 'feature' for a problem that was around when Windows 3.0 came out and 4Mb RAM cost £200+? I think so.

If you want to improve the speed of Windows, cut out the crap, perhaps have a 'turbo mode' whereby nothing loads so its a 'required driver only' load (similiar to safe mode) then there's more RAM for doing the job rather than running a dozen svchosts, perhaps an odd Adobe quick start, Nero update check and all the other rubbish that loads on each boot.
David Overton wrote re: How can you improve the performance of Windows Vista with a USB drive or key - have you heard of ReadyBoost yet?
on Thu, Jul 6 2006 1:48 PM
Have you ever seen Qi with Stephen Fry - you have just had the buzzer as an obvious, but unfortunately not quite right answer. :-)

I will tackle these one by one.
1) the drive is a writethru - so written data is cached on both devices - it is the reading that it improves the per of
2) The data is compresses and encrypted - see the blog I linked to for more information here
3) more memory is always the best answer, but as a stop gap, either for time or ease (some laptops will not upgrade) this will help performance, and it is a very non-technical deployment - most people can insert a USB stick vs a stick of memory

4) SATA drives are still not going to return much in a MB/s vs a USB stick if you have lots of random access reads, which is where the USB stick wins. Given the fact that a 1GB USB stick is minute in cost vs 1GB of RAM and most hard disks don't scratch the surface in terms of cache - 8,16,64MB - not anywhere enough to offset the impact of caching.

Why not try it?
tezfair wrote re: How can you improve the performance of Windows Vista with a USB drive or key - have you heard of ReadyBoost yet?
on Thu, Jul 6 2006 3:58 PM
If Windows has to spend time encrypting / decrypting 128bit algorythms how does this speed things up, surely whats gained on faster ram is lost by processor time, and if its writing the data to 2 devices, then surely there's syncing time to consider.

I see the point of convience, but the reality is that your going to need at least USB 2.0 for throughput, however since this is based on fairly new machines then the chances are that the base unit already has 512 ~ 1Gb RAM installed.

I think the problem comes from having an OS thats full of stuff thats simply not needed. I have yet to see anyone use Movie Maker during office time </example> Why do MS feel the need to make every version twice the size with twice the features when all it does is make it run twice as slow (unless you have dual core CPUs which then runs twice as fast...but then you have Windows which now runs at the same speed as Win95). <sigh>   :)
Tim Long wrote re: How can you improve the performance of Windows Vista with a USB drive or key - have you heard of ReadyBoost yet?
on Thu, Jul 6 2006 10:03 PM
If you've ever had to live with a system that is crippled because of all the paging it is doing, it's not hard to imagine how this can give a performance boost. My development workstation has a very 'odd' hard drive. It was OK when new but then it spent 6 weeks in a cargo container crossing the atlantic and it was never the same after that. It sort of runs slowly and the SMART feature has been predicting imminent failure for the last 4 years! Needless to say I don't keep any critical files on it (thank goodness My Documents is on the SBS server). Believe me, anything I can do to free up memory (thus reducing paging operations) on THAT system makes a huge difference. Given that a memory read is orders of magnitude faster than a disk read (maybe a 15ms seek and some latency while the disk turns then some I/O to read the data) then I can see how it would be worthwhile, even allowing for encryption of the data. For a badly overloaded system with heavy paging, this could eliminate almost half the disk I/O! If it extends the life of systems by 6 months or a year, then that's money saved by the customer. Of course those who shift boxes might not like that ;-)

I think this is a really clever bit of lateral thinking. It sort of reminds me of the systems that used to give you more memory by creating a compressed RAMdisk and paging to that. When Acer releases a driver set that is compatible with Vista, I will be sure to try this out.
Danny Kovacev wrote re: How can you improve the performance of Windows Vista with a USB drive or key - have you heard of ReadyBoost yet?
on Fri, Aug 10 2007 9:29 AM

First of all this isnt about ram, USB drive can write 4kb (smaller) much quicker then harddrive can, HD have access time of 8ms or more, and USB drive has 0.8 or less.

Secondly, Vista is much faster then XP, i dont know what computer your using, but it must be pre-historic.

Vista is new age Windows made for new age pc's, if you dont have a new PC then forget about Vista, and forget about ReadyBoost.

On my Pc with Vista 32bit, Games run quicker, Applications load quicker, heck there isnt even any loading time when turn on the PC, almost the second Bios has finished loading it jumps streight into the desktop, no Loading bar nothing,

Now with XP i get atleast 2 or 3 Bars across before it goes into desktop, and you know the loading bar that im talking about.

Exact same pc, and yet much quicker on Vista.

System Specs >

Processor - Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 - 3.0Ghz X2 1333 FSB

Memory -  Crucial DDR2 1067 - 2Gb Dual Kit (2X1Gb)

Power Supply - Coolermaster Real Power PRO 850w +80Version

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-N680SLI DQ6 Rev 2.0 (nforce 680)

Graphics - 2X 8800GTX 768Mb

Everything at Stock/deafult settings

Vista is built for Performance, To take advantage of it you must upgrade your PC,

i thought the exact same thing as you before, But when i purchased my PC last week i noticed Vista was nothing but performance over XP.

You must get a good USB Storage drive, you will see a differernce, if you dont, you either have no idea were and what performance increase your expecting or your blind.

The readyboost does not act like ram, its acting like a Mini Harddrive, its going to do all the small quick access stuff that the harddrive isnt capable of doing,

It wont increase the speed of copying files from one Computer to another, it wont increase the speed of anything that needs access to big files.

But it will increase the speed of opening some files, opening most programes, and it will defantly increase the speed of loading and shuting down windows.

You proberly wont see way to much difference on a really slow PC becuase theres more then just the Harddrive access slowing it down.

There is no bottleneck here on my pc, the only one is the harddrive,

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