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Windows Vista and Games Relating to running games and relateds issues under Windows Vista. (microsoft.public.windows.vista.games) |
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FSX/readyboost drive/performance
Hi,
My understanding is that a ready boost drive is a usb drive that vista uses to dump data to, rather than a hard disk as the readyboost drive is considered to be faster than the hard disk. So if my comment above is true, and I can now buy a 32gb readyboost drive for $70, is it a good idea to install games such as FsX onto a readyboost drive, and get better performance than using a HDD... ??? Thanks |
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FSX/readyboost drive/performance
Readyboost is a good thing for systems with less than 1gb of memory and
really slow hard drives, but over 1gb it doesn't seem to help much. However the actual issue is USB stick performance as a disk drive. On my system (Vista32, 2gb memory), using PerformanceTest 6.1: EIDE drive: sequential read=49.6MBytes/Sec, Seq write=53.7MBytes/Sec, Random r/w=3.41MBytes/Sec SATA drive: sequential read=57.7MBytes/Sec, Seq write=48.5MBytes/Sec, Random r/w=2.59MBytes/Sec USB2.0-connected external hard drive (Buffalo) I use for backups: sequential read=20.5MBytes/Sec, Seq write=20.3MBytes/Sec, Random r/w=2.91MBytes/Sec 1gb Memorex memory stick, plugged into a USB2.0 port: sequential read=10.3MBytes/Sec, Seq write=0.74MBytes/Sec, Random r/w=0.13MBytes/Sec The memory stick seemed really slow so I ran the test several times with the same results. Now my stick is a fairly old one so newer ones may be a lot faster, but the point is that you would have to check and see what your stick gives, you may end up without any performance increase. Hope that helps! Mark "Heath P. Dillon" wrote in message ... Hi, My understanding is that a ready boost drive is a usb drive that vista uses to dump data to, rather than a hard disk as the readyboost drive is considered to be faster than the hard disk. So if my comment above is true, and I can now buy a 32gb readyboost drive for $70, is it a good idea to install games such as FsX onto a readyboost drive, and get better performance than using a HDD... ??? Thanks |
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FSX/readyboost drive/performance
Firstly Readyboost only works up to 4GB in size so if you bought a 32GB usb
stick to use for readyboost then only the first 4gb would be used by the system and the other 28gb would be wasted. Secondly Readyboost works as a temp drive to cache data the operating system thinks you might need, for example certain files for programs you might regularly open so you dont actually install programs to the readyboost usb drive. Lastly, and this is more in responce to the other posters responce about drive speeds, the benefit of flash storage over hard disks isnt read/write speeds but instant seek times for a certain piece of data. So instead of with your conventional hard drive having do spin the platter around to the right location before it can start reading, flash can instantly access any sector on the disk making it very quick for random reads of small pieces of data. For sequencial blocks of data, eg a 700mb video file hard drives are still the quickest storage medium as the disk only has to seek once to find the start of the file and is then reading a continuous stream of data as the disk turns. HTH Robert "Heath P. Dillon" wrote in message ... Hi, My understanding is that a ready boost drive is a usb drive that vista uses to dump data to, rather than a hard disk as the readyboost drive is considered to be faster than the hard disk. So if my comment above is true, and I can now buy a 32gb readyboost drive for $70, is it a good idea to install games such as FsX onto a readyboost drive, and get better performance than using a HDD... ??? Thanks |
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FSX/readyboost drive/performance
"Heath P. Dillon" wrote in
: Hi, My understanding is that a ready boost drive is a usb drive that vista uses to dump data to, rather than a hard disk as the readyboost drive is considered to be faster than the hard disk. So if my comment above is true, and I can now buy a 32gb readyboost drive for $70, is it a good idea to install games such as FsX onto a readyboost drive, and get better performance than using a HDD... ReadyBoost is, as I understand it, just extra Cache RAM, and not really that great a thing. Like others have said it's good if you have a 1gig system ram, but anything over that it doesn't really help that much. The other problem is USB drives (HDD or Flash RAM sticks) just aren't that fast vs. your internal drive, so there's really no reason to install anything onto an external drive and expect better performance. Now, if you have an eSATA hard drive, that "should" be as fast or faster than your internal drive, so you could install an application externally that way, but otherwise it's important to remember that the hard drive inside your system is your slowest component, USB drives are slower than that so more system ram means you won't have to use those other slower components as often. Confused? Read a book. -J. -- Joe |
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FSX/readyboost drive/performance
It is not actually the raw drivespeed that shoud give an advantage, but the very low access times. Where the best harddrives get around 9ms, usb sticks and other flash based apparatus can nowadays easily go below 1ms access time. If readyboost puts a lot of small files in the aggregrated Readyboost.sf cache file on the stick, it can actually read them quite a bit faster than a harddrive can, because it totally eliminates all header seek and access moments (which can be a lot if qou combine it, 9ms is an utopia when you consider this) -- Venator69 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Venator69's Profile: http://forums.techarena.in/members/150161.htm View this thread: http://forums.techarena.in/windows-v...es/1087151.htm http://forums.techarena.in |
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FSX/readyboost drive/performance
It is not actually the raw drivespeed that shoud give an advantage, but the very low access times. Where the best harddrives get around 9ms, usb sticks and other flash based apparatus can nowadays easily go below 1ms access time. If readyboost puts a lot of small files in the aggregrated Readyboost.sf cache file on the stick, it can actually read them quite a bit faster than a harddrive can, because it totally eliminates all header seek and access moments (which can be a lot if qou combine it, 9ms is an utopia when you consider this) -- Venator69 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Venator69's Profile: http://forums.techarena.in/members/150161.htm View this thread: http://forums.techarena.in/windows-v...es/1087151.htm http://forums.techarena.in |
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