Hands on: Speed up with Readyboost

Find out how Vista’s booster technology provides many performance improvements

Since switching to Windows Vista from XP, my system doesn’t perform as quickly as before.

It’s certainly no slouch as far as hardware is concerned, based around an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 running at 2.66GHz with 2GB of Crucial DDR memory.

So I was intrigued by the performance claims behind Vista’s new Readyboost facility.

Readyboost exploits spare memory on Flash media, such as a USB key, to accelerate general performance. It creates an intermediate cache between the hard disk and Ram to provide Vista with a boost in performance.

Readyboost theory
Modern operating systems like Vista constantly swap data between the hard disk and main system Ram. Some of this activity is due to insufficient system Ram, but at other times, the OS is caching commonly used data for quicker retrieval in the future. The speed at which the OS can get hold of this cached data makes a big difference to overall performance.

Readyboost enables Vista to create an intermediate cache in Flash memory, such as a USB key. At first this seems odd, since hard disks deliver considerably quicker sequential data access, but decent Flash memory can outperform hard disks when it comes to small random-access transfers.

Since the Readyboost cache only contains duplicates of files that are still on the hard disk, there are no issues should you remove the Flash memory or decide to use it for transporting files instead. If Vista can’t find the required files on the Flash memory, or can’t find the device at all, it retrieves the files from the hard disk as before.

To support Readyboost, the Flash memory needs at least 2.5Mbytes/sec throughput for 4KB random reads and 1.75Mbytes/sec throughput for 512KB random writes. Flash devices claiming high speeds are normally referring to sequential transfers, so may not be up to the job here. If you’re buying media specifically for Readyboost, check with the manufacturer’s website for compatibility. Suffice it to say, you’ll also need USB2 connectivity.

Using Readyboost
Readyboost is easy to set up. Connect the Flash memory device and, if it’s sufficiently quick, Vista will ask if you’d like to use it to speed up the system. You can then choose how much of the device to use for Readyboost.

Microsoft recommends matching the Readyboost capacity to the amount of system Ram, so if you have 1GB of Ram, go for a 1GB device and assign it all to Vista.

Microsoft claims there can be benefits with up to 2.5 times more flash memory than Ram, up to a limit of 4GB – a restriction of the Fat32 file system.

For now, though, you can only use one Flash device at a time for Readyboost.

Normally in the Hardware and Performance features we’d use fresh Windows installations for benchmarking, but since Readyboost is designed to give a shot in the arm to existing systems, I thought I’d try it on my own office PC. To match its 2GB of system Ram, I got hold of a Crucial 2GB Gizmo Overdrive USB key, which at the time of writing cost £14 from www.crucial.com/uk.

To test its impact, I timed how long it took to boot Vista along with starting several applications, first without the key, then with the key configured to devote 1GB, then its full 2GB capacity to Readyboost.

Readyboost results
The presence of a Readyboost-configured key didn’t make any difference to my startup times and, strangely, it appeared to slow the initial startup times of my applications. Launching Outlook 2007 with a 120MB PST file took five seconds without Readyboost, six seconds with Readyboost configured to 1GB and eight seconds with 2GB. Photoshop CS2 took 5.7, 6.7 and nine seconds for the same configurations, respectively.

Closing the applications and restarting them straight away saw all the configurations speed up, but all to virtually the same time. So Outlook restarted in 2.8 seconds and Photoshop in 5.1 seconds, regardless of the presence of Readyboost.

I’d half expected a result like this after reading Microsoft’s comments about Readyboost being ideal to accelerate systems with ‘only’ 512MB or 1GB or Ram. Perhaps PCs with 2GB of Ram are beyond its help.

In next month’s column I’ll give Readyboost a further workout with alternative keys and also in systems equipped with less Ram. In the meantime I’d love to hear from anyone who’s using Readyboost and how they’ve found it in practice.