Performance
A system with 512 MB of RAM (the minimum requirement for Windows Vista) can see significant gains from ReadyBoost. In one test case, ReadyBoost speeds up an operation from 11.7 seconds to 2 seconds (conversely, increasing physical memory from 512 MB to 1 GB without ReadyBoost reduced it to 0.8 seconds). System performance with ReadyBoost can be monitored by Windows Performance Monitor.
The core idea of ReadyBoost is that a flash drive (aka USB thumb drive or USB memory stick) has a much faster seek time than a typical magnetic hard disk (less than 1 ms), allowing it to satisfy requests faster than reading files from the hard disk. It also leverages the inherent advantage of two parallel sources from which to read data, whereas Windows 7 enables the use of up to eight flash drives at once, allowing up to nine parallel sources. USB 2.0 flash drives are slower for sequential reads and writes than modern desktop hard drives. Desktop hard drives can sustain anywhere from 2 to 10 times the transfer speed of USB 2.0 flash drives but are equal to or slower than USB 3.0 and Firewire (IEEE 1394) for sequential data. USB 2.0 and faster flash drives have faster random access times: typically around 1 ms, compared to 8 ms and upwards for desktop hard drives.
On laptop computers, the performance shifts more in favor of flash memory when laptop memory is more expensive than desktop memory; many laptops also have relatively slow 4200 RPM and 5400 RPM hard drives.
In versions of Vista prior to SP1, ReadyBoost failed to recognize its cache data upon resume from sleep, and restarted the caching process, making ReadyBoost ineffective on machines undergoing frequent sleep/wake cycles. This problem was fixed in Vista SP1.
Read more about this topic: Ready Boost
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