Today I am writing about Microsoft’s Windows Vista’s ReadyBoost technology and is it worth all the hype.
But first an insight into what actually ReadyBoost is.
From Wikipedia:
ReadyBoost is a disk caching technology first included with Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system. It aims to make computers running Windows Vista more responsive by using flash memory on a USB 2.0 drive, SD card, CompactFlash, or other form of flash memory, in order to boost system performance.
When a ReadyBoost compatible device is plugged in, the Windows AutoPlay dialog offers an additional option to use it to speed up the system; an additional ReadyBoost tab is added to drive’s properties dialog where the amount of space to be used for ReadyBoost can be configured.
For a Device to be compatible with ReadyBoost in Microsoft Windows Vista it should meet the following requirements:
- The capacity of the removable media should be at least 256MB
- If the media is larger than 4GB only 4GB will be used for ReadyBoost
- The Device should have an access time of 1ms or less
- The device must be capable of 2.5MB/s read speeds for 4 kB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75MB/s write speeds for 512 kB random writes spread uniformly across the device
- The device must have at least 235 MB of free space
- NTFS (New Type File System) and FAT32 (File Allocation Table) both are supported
- Currently only one device is supported
Now coming the main article. Patriot 2 GB pen drive was used on the system with following specs (Core 2 Extreme X6800, ASUS P5B, Samsung SP0411N HDD, MSI GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB).
Hard Disk Drive benchmarching software like HDTach and Sandra were used, however there was no performance improvement but opposed to what was expected the performance dropped a bit.
But ReadyBoost is like added RAM and has nothing 2 do with the hard disk so guess we were wrong. 
So now the RAM of the system was reduced to 512 MB
Loading Photoshop CS2 for the first time took ~18seconds without ReadyBoost took 29seconds with ReadyBoost. Seems Windows Vista was caching Photoshop Files to the pen drive.
Then second time without ReadyBoost Photoshop CS2 took 5:30 seconds and with ReadyBoost took 4:40 seconds. 1 second was gained but was it worth the effort NO NOT ATALL
The performance gain in second time 18seconds vs 5:30 seconds was due to SuperFetch technology which has nothing to do with ReadyBoost.
Then Microsoft Word 2007 was loaded. Without ReadyBoost for first time took 5 seconds and with ReadyBoost took 26 seconds 
Loading for second time without ReadBoost took 1 second and with ReadyBoost took 1:50 second.
Is ReadyBoost meant to work this way ? Is this a Flaw in Vista or like Microsoft is doing making Flaws as Features. Is this also a feature ?
The mystery continues.
