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