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Using a pen / flash drive as extra RAM

mr motorola

By mr motorola
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mr motorola Member

mr motorola

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I have read a couple of pages about VISTA incorporating the use of a pen / flash drive to increase RAM on your system.

Basically you insert the drive into USB and the autoplay pops up asking the usual , with another tool at the bottom 'ready boost' 'would you like to increase your computer speed ...something or other' after selecting the one in question it then does a speed check on your pen drive.

With all the whys and wherefores , my question is which particular brand / make / speed should i be looking for?

 

I already have 2 gig of RAM onboard with an AMD quadcore and it is more than suffice , i guess i just like to play around with things and i'm also looking for a drive anyway.

It would be a very handy tool for some VISTA users though..................

Any ideas guys?

Fishing is fishing , Life is life , but life wouldn't be very enjoyable without fishing................ Mr M 12:03 / 19-3-2009

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Newt Member

Newt

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It seems that even with a good USB connection and pen drive, the speed compared to regular memory modules would be so slow that it would harm performance nearly as much as vitrual memory on a traditional hard drive.

" My choices in life were either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference!" - Harry Truman, 33rd US President

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jeepster Member

jeepster

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Ready Boost isn't RAM and according to every review I found on t'interweb isn't worth bothering with. More proper RAM is cheap enough these days.

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corydoras Member

corydoras

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Ready Boost isn't RAM and according to every review I found on t'interweb isn't worth bothering with. More proper RAM is cheap enough these days.
Your right, its not really RAM, but it can help some systems speed up a bit. It does not just work with USB pen Drives, it also works with other NAND type removable media like SD and CompactFlash. Vista uses Readyboost devices as a disk cache, and as a repository for SuperFetch information. It might speed up your system, it might not, but it can't do any harm to have a play.

The problem isn't what people don't know, it's what they know that just ain't so.
Vaut mieux ne rien dire et passer pour un con que de parler et prouver que t'en est un!
Mi, ch’fais toudis à m’mote

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Alnath Member

Alnath

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Ready boost will only offer any kind of performance hike to a PC with less than a gig of RAM and then the increase is pretty small. More physical RAM is the answer but then only if you are actually going to use it.

 

In times gone by the reason why adding RAM gave huge speed ups was because there was lass RAM in the PC that what even Windows needed to run and you was constantly in to the swap file where the PC uses a bit of the hard drive as RAM, of course hard drives are much slower than RAM so your PC felt like it was crawling, if you have a GB of RAM and you add another GB of RAM but never go over 1GB of then you wont notice a difference because you will never get the swap file hammering it.

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