Perhaps it was the media itself (2GB "High Speed" SD), but upon removing it
after a three day what-the-hell test/try out period, all the random startup
hangs, shutdown delays, random seize ups, etc., have completely disappeared
on this notebook Vista Business installation.
Granted, with 2GB RAM it was obviously not necessary in the first place, but
perhaps more to the point, it appears to have been totally undersirable ...
at least on this machine, a Dell XPS M1210.
Readyboost is one of the biggest bullshit hypes ever to come out of
Redmond next to Vista. They both fit together really well as they are both
slow and pointless.
The concept in itself actually isn't bad, using flash memory for virtual
memory storage. Flash does not suffer from seek times that a hard drive
does so read access is incredibly fast. However, this is only of relevance
when flash is actually directly connected to the CPU and located on the
motherboard.
The reason is very simple: Bandwidth and overhead
Hard drives, while having seek times, have several times more bandwidth
than flash memory does. They can read / write data much faster once the
seek is complete. Especially writes are much better with a hard drive
because a hard drive can write in 512 byte sectors while a flash card,
especially higher capacity ones, generally uses sectors in the kilobytes in
size. I've seen sector sizes in flash memory as high as 64kb so when you
go to write data, you have to write the full sector. Higher capacity cards
generally have larger sectors. So if the system needs to write 10 bytes,
and the media has a sector size of 4kb, it needs to write 4096 bytes to
modify the 10 bytes it actually wants to change. Even worse if the 10
bytes are on a sector boundary.
Hard drive in contrast has a worst-case of 1024 bytes (2 512 byte sectors).
Second comes that, with the exception of laptops I suppose, I don't see
very many PCs with built-in card readers. So most people need to use
external USB readers so any read / write incurs USB overhead on top of
that and USB bandwidth is far lower than hard drive bandwidth. And
actually, I am not even sure if systems that do have built in readers, may
not just be using USB internally to communicate with them. I never checked.
On the bottom line Readyboost just isn't worth the bits needed to
represent its name in ASCII. A user would be far better off buying a
second hard drive and putting the swap file on a small partition of that
second hard drive.
They'd get the benefits of parallel data access because virtual memory
seeks would not distrupt the primary hard drive and vice versa. And,
they'd even get extra space on their system to store stuff.
--
Stephan
2003 Yamaha R6
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