ready boost

[paul holder]

has any one used ready boost with windows 7 instead of a scratch disk

[SmartWombat]

Instead of swap space? No.
Although it's meant to be fast, if you're using a USB 4G stick as readyboost then it's running at USB speed.
Plus these memory devices wear out with read/write cycles, and Windows is going to exercise those pretty hard!

For fastest running I'd use a solid state disk as the swap partition, and allocate 3x your physical memory.

[Franglais]

My impression is that USB sticks are fast to read but slow to write. I thought that the idea of readyboost was for the system to store commonly used programs on a flash drive and read them into memory quickly without being bothered by all the other activity on the system disk

On my home PC I can get:

- 45MB/sec reading from SATA disk and writing to a 2nd SATA disk
- 23.5MB/Sec reading UDMA CF card via a USB2 card reader and writing to SATA disk
- 9MB/sec reading from SATA disk and writing to UDMA CF card via USB2

[SmartWombat]

Yes but since it's removable media it is questionable whether it's worth it.
The caching algorithm has to assume the media will be unplugged at any time, even when reading a program. So really a fast SSD is a better performance solution.