Speeding Windows Vista with USB drives

One of the notable improvement of Windows Vista is the feature called "ReadyBoost". This is part of Windows Vista's improved I/O (input/output) subsystem features.

ReadyBoost is a feature which allows you to improve Windows Vista system performance by using USB flash-based storage memory disk, SD cards and compact-flash storage cards.

Overview

Whenever you a load a windows application (for example Microsoft Word or Photoshop), it is read from the hard disk and loaded into your computers temporary memory (RAM/System Memory) hence the bigger RAM the faster you applications will load.

To make programs loads faster, Windows Vista will try to cache (prepare it and read it for loading store into a file) frequently loaded applications, it will try to learn from your habits on what applications are being loaded when you're working on Windows. This is feature is know as "Superfetch", This feature was introduced earlier with Windows XP known as "PreFetcher" which stored cache on the hard disk. One drawback of this, was that the hard disk is far slower to access than RAM, while the cache stored in the hard disk would help, the performance is as only good as the speed of your computer's hard disk.

With Windows Vista, the SuperFetch feature is augmented by "ReadyBoost", instead of storing the cache on the hard disk drive, it now store this into USB Flash-memory based drives, this heavily improves system performance since these drives as a lot faster to access compared to the slower hard disk drives.

Using ReadyBoost

Make sure you have met the following before proceeding with rest of the steps:

• A spare or free USB 2.0 compliant USB port
• A USB 2.0 based flash-memory storage device such as SD Card, Compact-Flash memory card, USB disk drive.
• The USB drive must have at least 256 MB worth of free space.

Step 1:

Insert you USB flash-memory based drive into your USB port. Once plug Windows Vista will prompt with the dialog box similar to the one below, click on "Speed up my system". Window Vista will now do some testing if your drives met the speed requirements for ready-boost.

Once the test have been, the dialog box with the ReadyBoost tab will be shown.

 

Step 2:

Click on the "Use this device", you will also be prompted for the disk space to allocate along with the recommended size for ReadyBoost, the click on apply.

Step 3:

Verify that ReadyBoost is working, you can do this by opening the USB drive with Windows Explorer and will find the "Ready Boost Cache.sfcache" file, this file will now be populated with the "SuperFetch" cache. For added Security the file is encrypted with AES 256 Bit encryption, Also when the drive is remove this is automatically deleted by Windows.

 

The cache file size is compressed on a 2:1 ratio, So if you have 256MB of cache file, this is equivalent to 1024 MB worth of cache data. Windows will also compute based on the amount of free-space you have on your USB disk drive and the amount of Physical Memory your computer have to give out the optimal size of your cache file to be user for ReadyBoost.

ReadyBoost tools:

If you want to see ReadyBoost in action, you can download the tool RBMon - ReadyBoost Monitor.