Windows vista ready boost

[Elspuddy]

i'v got an 1 gig usb key and a usb card reader, can i use the usb key and the card reader to do a bigger ready boost ?

[Almightyrastus]

wouldn't the IO speed across USB be slower than the hard drive read speed and thus negate any benifit from readyboost?

[capnPedro]

As far as I can tell, you can only use one device at a time. So use whichever has the faster read and write speeds.

Originally Posted by Almightyrastus

wouldn't the IO speed across USB be slower than the hard drive read speed and thus negate any benifit from readyboost?

No. That's not how ReadyBoost works. Google it.
And yes, it does in fact work. Saves about 2 seconds opening Photoshop for me anyway.

[Bindibadgi]

Actually it kind of does - PCI-Express ReadyBoost is FAR more efficient wrt USB. That's why it's such a shame we haven't seen PCI-E x1 cards hit the market - I saw them at Computex but was told (and reported in the news) that we'd never see it until at least version 2 of Intel's Santa Rosa platform arrives next year when prices go down and you, performance is increased by a ton and it can then address up to 4GB instead of just 1GB.

I've heard from quite a few people in the industry that USB is just not worth it and even the current ReadyBoost on PCI-E only really offers the greatest benefit in mobile solutions for power saving as well as working all off a single (usually slower) disk, if you can't afford a full solid state drive.

I use it on at home simply because my P5B "Vista Edition" has 1GB of NAND hardwired to the board, but I can't say it's changed my computing experience noticeably at all. I'd just spend the cash on more system memory.