?????I bought a 2 gig thumb drive today to try it. Anyone using it? Do you know what I mean? Does it make a difference in FSX?Let's talk about it!

All ReadyBoost does is use the thumb drive as a high speed swap file, rather than using your slower Hard Drive as the swap file. It has nothing to do with game performance.

The way I understood, Readyboost uses Prefetch to guess what files will be needed next, and preload them on the USB drive. This should speed up loading files from the hard drive to memory by reducing the access times. Prefetch is supposed to learn from your PC habits and preload the needed files before they are called by the system.USB drives are slower during read/write operations then hard drives, but their advantage is the zero seek times.You will find that Vista does not accept every USB drive, there are some speed requirements.It did speed up booting of my Vista system, and the impact to FS should be significant (theoretically) because of the high number of read calls, but I did not measure it.regards, Jan

Seems then, that there are different theories on the use of ReadyBoost....as I read the responses to this thread. I know USB must be USB 2.0 and have at least 256 mg of space.I'll be testing it in FSX....just wanted to know if anyone has real specifics on it.

ReadyBoost is a Vista feature designed to make it easy for folks with limited-memory machines to increase overall Vista performance. I think it will make no difference at all with FSX nor with normal Vista operations on any machine with a large amount of system memory. The best explaination I know of is here: http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsv...readyboost.aspx . ReadyBoost works fine when a limited-system system needs a large number of random file reads. But, with a large amount of sequential data, as I suspect FSX uses, ReadyBoost will default to the HDD. As far as the swapfile issue, with 4GB of installed system memory I'd just disable the pagefile which will force all virtual memory operations to RAM.Doug

>Let's talk about it!I agree with Doug - ReadyBoost will make the most difference for those with limited amounts of RAM (512MB-1GB). The more RAM you have, the less difference you will see. Given that the original poster has 4 GB of RAM, I highly doubt that he will observe any sort of improvement, unless he uses programs and apps that will fully tax all 4 GB on a regular basis. Most articles I have read indicate this as well. There are also thumbdrive speed requirements that must be met - unfortunately, I have yet to see any USB2 thumbdrives that advertise themselves as being fast enough, but obviously there are some that will work. ReadyBoost is a great idea, but it is not quite meant for system enthusiasts who build robust computers. Looking forward to your reports though - sometimes you can't believe what the reviewers are saying...-Greg

The first reply was correct. ReadyBoost is a cache for your swap file. The swap file (or as much of it as will fit) is kept on your flash drive and on your hard drive. When Vista needs to fetch pages from the swap file, ReadyBoost will go to the flash drive first, which is much faster. If for some reason, the flash drive is removed, ReadyBoost will go to the hard drive. The data on the flash drive is encrypted, so you don't have to worry about it falling into the wrong hands.ReadyBoost will give diminishing returns if you have a lot of memory. Vista's first choice is to use main memory. It's second choice is SuperFetch, which caches in main memory. Then, if it hits the swap file, ReadyBoost can help. Naturally, ReadyBoost yields more performance on systems where the swap file is used more (memory constrained, or on systems that use a big working set).Vista will test a flash drive to see if it is suitable for ReadyBoost. The drive needs to meet some performance paramenters. If it doesn't meet the parameters, you're out of luck. I tried an old crappy flash drive, and it got rejected.ReadyBoost makes heavy use of random reads/writes. There are not as many sequential reads/writes going on. So you really want a flash drive that is optimized for random access. The vendors are starting to put out flash drives that are optimized for random access. One is the Corsair TurboFlash (which is what I got).Now as far as FSX is concerned, I would speculate that ReadyBoost will not help very much. If you're hitting the swap file (via ReadyBoost or not) with FSX, you're in trouble. I could be wrong though. In my informal testing, I saw no FPS difference.

>The first reply was correct. ReadyBoost is a cache for your>swap file. The swap file (or as much of it as will fit) is>kept on your flash drive and on your hard drive. When Vista>needs to fetch pages from the swap file, ReadyBoost will go to>the flash drive first, which is much faster. If for some>reason, the flash drive is removed, ReadyBoost will go to the>hard drive. The data on the flash drive is encrypted, so you>don't have to worry about it falling into the wrong hands.>>ReadyBoost will give diminishing returns if you have a lot of>memory. Vista's first choice is to use main memory. It's>second choice is SuperFetch, which caches in main memory. >Then, if it hits the swap file, ReadyBoost can help. >Naturally, ReadyBoost yields more performance on systems where>the swap file is used more (memory constrained, or on systems>that use a big working set).>>Vista will test a flash drive to see if it is suitable for>ReadyBoost. The drive needs to meet some performance>paramenters. If it doesn't meet the parameters, you're out of>luck. I tried an old crappy flash drive, and it got>rejected.>>ReadyBoost makes heavy use of random reads/writes. There are>not as many sequential reads/writes going on. So you really>want a flash drive that is optimized for random access. The>vendors are starting to put out flash drives that are>optimized for random access. One is the Corsair TurboFlash>(which is what I got).>>Now as far as FSX is concerned, I would speculate that>ReadyBoost will not help very much. If you're hitting the>swap file (via ReadyBoost or not) with FSX, you're in trouble.> I could be wrong though. In my informal testing, I saw no>FPS difference.Hi,I made some tests with readyboost and noticed no big differences in system speed.readyboost is only used if swap space is necessary because it goes faster than HDD.The above explanation is absolutely correct.RegardsYves Lefevre

Here is a quote from MS Technet MAgazine by Mark Russinovitch:"If you aren't already using a device for caching, and the new device is between 256MB and 32GB in size, has a transfer rate of 2.5MB/s or higher for random 4KB reads, and has a transfer rate of 1.75MB/s or higher for random 512KB writes, then ReadyBoost will ask if you'd like to dedicate up to 4GB of the storage for disk caching. (Although ReadyBoost can use NTFS, it limits the maximum cache size to 4GB to accommodate FAT32 limitations.) If you agree, then the service creates a caching file named ReadyBoost.sfcache in the root of the device and asks SuperFetch to prepopulate the cache in the background.After the ReadyBoost service initializes caching, the Ecache.sys device driver intercepts all reads and writes to local hard disk volumes (C:, for example), and copies any data being written into the caching file that the service created. Ecache.sys compresses data and typically achieves a 2:1 compression ratio so a 4GB cache file will usually contain 8GB of data. The driver encrypts each block it writes using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption with a randomly generated per-boot session key in order to guarantee the privacy of the data in the cache if the device is removed from the system.When ReadyBoost sees random reads that can be satisfied from the cache, it services them from there, but because hard disks have better sequential read access than flash memory, it lets reads that are part of sequential access patterns go directly to the disk even if the data is in the cache."Apparently ReadyBoost works in conjunction with SuperFetch (superfetch also works to optimize RAM usage in addition to speeding up file I/O from storage).Since FSX is making large numbers of texture loads from disk, I would expect this technology to have some impact. IIUC if it is loading landclass in the distance, it will load the 4x4 MIP out of a texture file. As you get closer it will return to the file and load bigger MIPs. I don't think it automatically stores all MIPs out of a texture at one time (cause of blurries). This would need quite a bit of memory for the 1024x1024 full size MIPs if they weren't required. IIRC in FS9 about 21,000 texture tiles are required assuming visibility is set unlimited (more of an issue with photo-scenes where there isn't texture reuse). (This is with EXTENDED TEXTURES set. I don't think FSX has this switch. Not sure how FSX handles the "detailed" landclass view.)scott s..

> As far as the swapfile issue, with 4GB of installed>system memory I'd just disable the pagefile which will force>all virtual memory operations to RAM.>>Doug Yikes! That's a debateable practice, fo' sure... :)RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

Isn't the problem with current (FLASH) USB-sticks, that they 'evaporate' after a couple of 100k cycles? :-) AFAIK, we need to wait for a tech called NAND. Conclusion, maybe? The OS is ready, but the hardware is yet to be seen... :-) Ha! That's a little, tiny, wee bit like FSX! :-) Kind regards Jaap

ReadyBoost knows about the lifecycle issues with flash drives. It spreads out the writes so the flash RAM gets used evenly. Microsoft estimates you'll get something like 10 years of use before it will die (or something like that).Here, I just found this on the Windows Vista/Longhorn Blog.http://jo-san.it/blogs/windows_vistalongho...11/22/5728.aspxQ: Won't this wear out the drive?A: Nope. We're aware of the lifecycle issues with flash drives and are smart about how and when we do our writes to the device. Our research shows that we will get at least 10+ years out of flash devices that we support.

Here's some gaming benchmarks with ready boost and various amounts of RAM. As you can see it only has an effect when you are using a Vista crippling 512MB of RAM. With all the games, other than CoH, its has no effect once you get up to 1GB of RAM.So it has no effect on gaming unless you are not using the required amount of RAM for the given game, which forces it to use the swap file in place of RAM.http://www.gamespot.com/features/6167115/i...topslot;title;2

I'm not sure I accept Gamespot's conclusions. Since Readyboost is connected to Superfetch, it seems like more of a measure of superfetch performance. However, from what I can tell, superfetch is pretty complicated in how it operates, with "learning" algorithms. So far I haven't seen any guidance on how to tweak superfetch performance for games, or if that is even possible.scott s..