Vista Defragmenter and ReadyBoost drive

[Guest]

Hi,

I noticed something funny on my laptop last night.

I have a 2GB SD card which I use for Vista Readboost.

My laptop is scheduled to perform the Vista Defragmenter at 22:00 each
Sunday. At exactly that time, the light for the SD card started flashing a
whole bunch.
To me, this appears like the defragmenter had kicked-in and was trying to
defrag the Readyboost drive.

Now, as the Vista defragmenter GUI is so limited, is there (a) a way I can
tell if it is defragmenting this drive or not and (b) a way to stop it from
doing so.

Surely it's not necessary to defragment this as it's basically one large
file and also will it not reduce the life of the flash memory considerably by
defragmenting?

Any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[Dana Cline - MVP]

I'm not sure if you can adjust this or not...I've found that for Vista,
Diskeeper is a good solution, and you can certainly adjust it there. I enjoy
seeing my defrag work, and Vista's defrag took that away from us.

I like the idea of using an SD card as a ReadyBoost - thought that only
worked with USB sticks. Can you notice a difference?

Dana Cline - MCE MVP

 

[Guest]

Hi,

I'm going to give PerfectDisk a go as that comes highly recommended.

I'm using the SD card on a Toshiba M5 laptop and it definitely seems to
improve things - and no USB stick poking out of the back!

 

[AJR]

Defraggmentation utilizes "Superfetch" (Paging file) - therefore ReadyBoost
is involved.

 

[Rock]

Hi,

I noticed something funny on my laptop last night.

I have a 2GB SD card which I use for Vista Readboost.

My laptop is scheduled to perform the Vista Defragmenter at 22:00 each
Sunday. At exactly that time, the light for the SD card started flashing a
whole bunch.
To me, this appears like the defragmenter had kicked-in and was trying to
defrag the Readyboost drive.

Now, as the Vista defragmenter GUI is so limited, is there (a) a way I can
tell if it is defragmenting this drive or not and (b) a way to stop it
from
doing so.

Surely it's not necessary to defragment this as it's basically one large
file and also will it not reduce the life of the flash memory considerably
by
defragmenting?

I believe as part of the optimization process for ReadyBoost the device is
defragmented at specific intervals. Look in Event Viewer at the ReadyBoost
log under Applications and Services Logs | Microsoft | Windows | ReadyBoost
| Operational look for Event ID 1017. I suppose when a system defrag is
started it could also look at the drive used for ReadyBoost.

ReadyBoost constantly writes to the device, so the defrag is not going to do
much to decrease lifetime. If you want to see these writes, open
Reliability and Performance Monitor, expand the disk section and look for
reads/writes to this file: X:\ReadyBoost.sfcache, where X is the driver
letter for the ReadyBoost device.

 

[peaheadster]

Hi,

I'm going to give PerfectDisk a go as that comes highly recommended.

I'm using the SD card on a Toshiba M5 laptop and it definitely seems to
improve things - and no USB stick poking out of the back!

I use PerfectDisk as well - Good stuff! I heard a rumor that they
(Raxco) will have something out next Tuesday that will be a huge
addition to the Vista PC health market. I'll check it out and let you
know.....

 

[john kimmich]

Nope not at all. I use an sd card also... You should buy a highspeed 16 gigabyte SD card ^_- a regular SD card is just about as fast as a regular flash drive.... but yeah windows boots super fast since I put in... and some programs start faster as well