Suggestions for ReadyBoost stability?

[Guest]

I have a SanDisk Cruzer Titanium 2GB drive, running on a P4 extreme 3.2 w/ 2
GB system RAM. I'm running RC2, build 5744.

ReadyBoost worked smootly when I plugged the drive in, I used the default
1840 MB suggested cache drive size, the ReadyBoost.sfcache file gets created,
I see the file there, but then, anywhere from 1 minute to 6 hours, the file
disappears. I don't see anything in the ReadyBoost log file, I don't get any
messages, it just goes away seemingly randomly. I can recreate the file by
just adjusting the size and the same situation repeats itself. Restarting the
system or the ReadyBoost service doesn't change this behavior.

I know that ReadyBoost is designed to fail back to the HD this way when it
encounters errors, but this is a brand new USB drive, I've formatted it,
scandisked it, and it comes up clean every time.

Where should I look for more diagnostic information? Is there anything I
should try to increase the stability?

Bonus Q: FAT or FAT32?

 

[Rafferty Conrad]

Corey,

I don't know if this will help you with stability but it seemed to with
my ready boost. Try reformatting as NTFS if you have the option.

 

[Guest]

Thanks. I was able to reformat NTFS and set up ReadyBoost again, but I seem
to have the exact same behavior.

 

[Rafferty Conrad]

Hmmm. May be an issue with the OS then. Have you tryed having a look at the
error logs with the management console thing? Can't tell you much about it
myself I haven't had to use it yet... Still windows is SUPPOSED to log
every error for hardware/software. Maybe something is listed?

So you know... there is an ongoing discussion of ReadyBoost in the
vista.general group ... maybe if you post there someone else might see it
and be more helpful than I can.

Good Luck

Raff

 

[Guest]

I have a new theory (also posted to the Vista.General discussion) on my
problem.

I disabled the ipod service that comes itunes installed and it has been up
ever since. This is just a theory and it hasn't been long enough to prove
anything, but I was planning on stopping services and uninstalling stuff
until I got it working and that was my first guess.

 

[Dave Burns]

Cool - a new bug! Apparently the iPod is polling everything on the USB bus.
As soon as another service hits the optional swap device, Windows stops
using it?

-- Dave

 

[Guest]

I wish it were that easy. That theory hasn't stuck. The file eventually
disappeared and I'm back to where I was.

I did more research and looked into this business with U3. Turns out some
USB drives have a hidden partition which shows up in the device manager as a
CD drive with software on it. There's an uninstaller tool at the official U3
site: http://www.u3.com/uninstall/. I uninstalled U3, reformatted, but no
change in my ReadyBoost behavior -- it is totally unstable.

-Corey