To see an increase in performance you will want to reserve the maximum 4094 MB, which is the largest amount useable by the Windows operating system. If the drive is acceptable, you will be presented with a screen that allows you to dedicate the entire device to ReadyBoost or to reserve a certain amount of space on the drive for ReadyBoost. Unfortunately, Windows will not tell you why the drive is not compatible with ReadyBoost, it simply gives you a “failed” screen. If the external drive is not up to the ReadyBoost standards you will be presented with a “failed” screen as shown below. In most cases, however, you will see a ReadyBoost tab and a notice saying that ReadyBoost is assessing the capabilities of the drive. If you don’t see the ReadyBoost tab, it means that the external drive will not support ReadyBoost. Just insert your device into the computer, access its Properties dialog as select the ReadyBoost tab.
Yet with ReadyBoost, if you have an external drive available, you don’t have to fret about its speed. Not all USB drives, however, no matter what version they are, are created equal. Obviously a USB3 drive will be speedier than an older USB drive. Microsoft states that the compression that occurs has a typical ratio of 2:1 which means that a 4GB drive can contain approximately 8GB of data. However, ReadyBoost compresses and encrypts all the data that is put on the external device. ReadyBoost will use 4 GB of space on the drive and this doesn’t sound like much.
Capacity of at least 256 MB, with at least 64 kilobytes (KB) of free space.Requirements of the external drive to be used with ReadyBoost are: This is true with all current versions of Windows including Windows 10. However, computers with average or below-average read-write drives can see a significant increase in speed with ReadyBoost. If Windows is installed on an SSD, ReadyBoost will actually be disabled since the speed of the disk will surpass the speed of the external drive. The bottom line about the usability of ReadyBoost is that if you have a hard drive with really speedy read/write access, ReadyBoost will be of little use to you. The drive, assisted by on onboard data buffer, however is speedier than such a hard drive for smaller blocks non-sequential files, so ReadyBoost handles those. ReadyBoost is aware that reading large sequential files from flash memory is actually slower than reading it from a fairly speedy hard drive, so it allows the system to read such large sequential data directly from the hard drive. This technology analyses the computer behavior patterns and loads often used data components into memory before they are required to speed up performance. ReadyBoost relies on the SuperFetch technology that was first implemented in Windows Visa. Also, all data uses AES-128 encryption so that if the USB drive is lost or stolen, the data will be protected. This implementation means that data is still written to the hard drive and will not be lost if the USB drive is pulled out of the port.
Instead of actually caching file writes, it acts as a write-through cache. As we will explore in this article, there are times when ReadyBoost can be used as an effective tool as well as times when it shows no performance enhancement at all.Īs a performance tool ReadyBoost is smart and well-designed. It is a little known Windows feature that can use external USB flash drives (or SD cards or CF cards), as a hard disk cache to speed up disk read performance. ReadyBoost has been around since the days of Windows Vista.