Memorex 4GB travelmate incompatible with ReadyBoost

[Lakesidezx]

Just in case anyone else feels like taking advantage of the sale at staples
for the Memorex 4GB travelmate usb flash drive to use for ReadyBoost. Don't
bother, it isn't compatible.

It's still a good price at $54.00 if you have a need for a 4GB flash drive
but according to vista it's too slow to use for readyboost unfortunately.

 

[Ron Miller]

Just in case anyone else feels like taking advantage of the sale at
staples for the Memorex 4GB travelmate usb flash drive to use for
ReadyBoost. Don't bother, it isn't compatible.

It's still a good price at $54.00 if you have a need for a 4GB flash
drive but according to vista it's too slow to use for readyboost
unfortunately.

Nice to know. I noted their ad in today's paper and was headed there to
get the 2GB model expressly for ReadyBoost use. Memorex makes crappy
recordable media' I guess the same is true of their thumb drives.
Where I live, there's a chain called Inkstop that has a Lexar 2GB drive
advertised for $30, so I might try that.

BTW, from what I read, unless you have more than 2 GB of RAM, there's no
use getting a ReadyBoost thumb drive that's larger than 2GB. Newegg has
a number of thumb drives that claim to be "ReadyBoost compatible," but
none is inexpensive.

 

[Billy]

The buffallo 2GB in Tesco works well as soon as you plug it on. It is sale
£29 or £35 full price!

B

 

[Lakesidezx]

I have 3GB in my computer thats why I opted for the 4GB model, but I may
remove 1GB of memory out of my computer since it's mismatched. I have two
1GB sticks of memory and two 512MB sticks of memory that I had left over
from a friends computer rebuild, so I stuck them in, but I'll probably
remove them since they are mismatched and I think slightly slower than my
two 1GB sticks of memory. In which case I'd probably benefit from just a
2GB USB flash device instead of the 4GB which Im going to try to return
today since I have no reason to keep a USB flash thumb device in my
household.

 

[Lakesidezx]

And I forgot to mention that I have the PNY attache 1GB thumb drive and it
works with readyboost but I dont think I actually benefit anything from it
since it's only 1/3rd of the total amount of ram that I have in my computer.

 

[Ron Miller]

And I forgot to mention that I have the PNY attache 1GB thumb drive and
it works with readyboost but I dont think I actually benefit anything
from it since it's only 1/3rd of the total amount of ram that I have in
my computer.

ReadyBoost is probably most useful in laptops where it can prevent some
disk thrashing which, in turn, prolongs battery life. The increase in
performance in a desktop would be harder to discern, but it's certainly
there, even if it's only 1/3 of total memory. The more important
comparison would seem to be to the size of your swap file -- i.e., what
percentage of the swap file could be mirrored to the thumb drive and
therefore avoid the head-seek delay inherent in picking bits and bytes
from the swap file on the HD.

 

[Bret Butcher]

Just in case anyone else feels like taking advantage of the sale at
staples for the Memorex 4GB travelmate usb flash drive to use for
ReadyBoost. Don't bother, it isn't compatible.

It's still a good price at $54.00 if you have a need for a 4GB flash
drive but according to vista it's too slow to use for readyboost
unfortunately.

I had the same problem with a PNY 2gb. It constantly failed the test.
I ran across another post and someone mentioned it could be a problem
with the drives format. I reformated my PNY 2gb and it passed the test
and is now being used for ready boost. Just thought I'd pass it along.

 

[Lakesidezx]

I too ran across some posts about how this Memorex travel drive worked and
how they formatted it to NTFS and 16kb, so I tried that, as well as many
other possibilities but just couldn't get it to work.

I have a strong suspicion that this feature is bugged in vista and how it
detects. Because what works for one should surely work for another, meaning
that if someone formats the travel drive to NTFS and 16kb then that should
also work for someone else.

But I've also found that the PNY 4GB Attache drive that I bought today was
being reported as not compatible, but in the end it turned out that it was
compatible (I have another post here about it so I'll just quote myself
below):
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Okay, after vista reported that my Memorex traveldrive (4GB) is
incompatible, I just returned it to the store and bought a PNY 4(GB) attache
device.

Vista reported this as incompatible for ReadyBoost.
But heres what I noted.....

I went into windows explorer and right clicked on the USB PNY device and
chose the readyboost tab, then test again, each time it failed the test, but
what I noted was that the screen behind the properties screen (the windows
explorer screen) was writing a .tmp file to the "H" hard drive, which is a
physical hard drive on my system and the PNY device is listed at location
G:\

So what was happening is that windows for some unknown reason seemed to be
writing it's temp testing file to one of my physical hard drives instead of
the actual usb flash device.

The work around for myself was to make sure that I had highlighted the G:\
(PNY USB flash device) AND then right click on it and choose properties then
the readyboost tab then test again and sure enough it is compatible.

This makes me think that *perhaps* the same thing was happening with the
Memorex traveldrive as well that I returned to the store, but I can't be
certain since I already returned it.

Just an FYI for anyone else that has a problem with the PNY 4GB attache
flash device.

 

[Keith]

One other work-around is to go to the properties and set it to optimize for
performance - worked on my generic 2gb micro-center drive.

 

[Ron Miller]

One other work-around is to go to the properties and set it to optimize
for performance - worked on my generic 2gb micro-center drive.

Go to "properties" of what? The only place I can recall a choice like
that is in Display properties.


snip

 

[Keith]

Device manager->Disk Drives and select your flash drive, right click and go
to policies and change to optimize for performance if it is not set.

 

[Donald McDaniel]

Device manager->Disk Drives and select your flash drive, right click and
go to policies and change to optimize for performance if it is not set.

I bought a 4gb Sandisk Cruzer. Works great under Vista as a Ready-Boost
device. I gave Vista half of it. To be honest, I really can't say that
Vista is any snappier with it in, though. I am not in the habit of
measuring time in the milliseconds. All I know is that it's working,
because I can see the green light flashing when I have disk activity.

One thing which will REALLY give your install a boost is to TURN OFF
INDEXING service, and KEEP it off. With indexing turned on, my HDs are
constantly grinding, and all disk and Desktop operations are sluggish as
hell.

 

[MICHAEL]

Go to "properties" of what? The only place I can recall a choice like that is in Display
properties.

ReadyBoost can be a tricky thing to get working
on some flash drives, and a lot of flash drives
just aren't fast enough for ReadyBoost.

Try this first;
Go into Device Manager>Disk Drives
Find your flash drive. Double click it.
Policies tab.
Make sure "Optimize for performance" is checked.

Test again.

Sometimes even formatting the drive can do the trick.
Either FAT or FAT32.

Make sure it's not plugged into a USB hub.
Or, try plugging it into another slot.


ReadyBoost - Using Your USB Key to Speed Up Windows Vista
http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/04/14/576548.aspx