Vista "Boost" with USB flash drives?

**...bigdog...** · 03-11-07, 10:07 PM

http://www.gamespot.com/features/616...opslot;title;1

wierd.

**MotoZ** · 03-11-07, 11:00 PM

I imagine the flash drive operates like disk-based virtual memory and takes priority over it with a small improvement in bandwidth (USB 2.0 bandwidth vs. PCI/SATA bandwidth + HDD seek time).

It would be interesting to see if the flash drive can simply be unplugged without crashing the application that's using it. If one clicked the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon (at least that what it's called in WinXP) then the OS would have an opportunity to flush the flash to disk and then redirect the memory map.

**...bigdog...** · 03-12-07, 10:59 AM

Originally Posted by ebaconjr

I imagine the flash drive operates like disk-based virtual memory and takes priority over it with a small improvement in bandwidth (USB 2.0 bandwidth vs. PCI/SATA bandwidth + HDD seek time).

It would be interesting to see if the flash drive can simply be unplugged without crashing the application that's using it. If one clicked the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon (at least that what it's called in WinXP) then the OS would have an opportunity to flush the flash to disk and then redirect the memory map.

I don't know, but the stats they put up are pretty convincing.

However.....it appears that once you cross the 1 gig - 1.5 gigs of RAM margin....the benefits of the USB drive addition are pretty null.

But....yeah.....I argree it's probably a simple virtual memory buffer to add to whats already in the system. All that "prefetching" stuff.

**Consultant** · 03-12-07, 11:06 AM

Looks cool to me, and who can argue with those results?

Innovative, to say the least.

**JimboIncinerator** · 03-16-07, 12:48 PM

If you guys do the Flash drive thing make sure you get a fast thumb drive or it wont be worth your time. Flash drives have a much quicker access time compared to hard drives... Though there through put is slower. So with small files it can load things faster than a hard drive. Vista optimizes the thumb drive so it can take full advantage of it. You will notice a big difference in boot times on laptops because they have slower hard drivers to begin with.

Later

**Manse** · 03-17-07, 08:25 PM

hooray for swap drives. If you were brave, you could probably do this in XP, as well. At the very least, put your pagefile on a flash drive.

**TexRyker** · 03-24-07, 10:00 AM

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006q1...m/index.x?pg=1 This is the daddy for readyboost and will work in XP... Imagine booting to desktop in under 10 seconds from POST. Nice.

On a side note readyboot does help. My buddy runs in on his box and it made a difference for sure. Worth looking into.