HOW TO GUIDE: Force Readyboost to work on EXTERNAL HARD DRIVES and UNSUPPORTED DEVICES

Heres how to get Readyboost to work on unsupported devices and external hard drives.

1. Plug in the device.
2. Open the Readyboost tab on the device properties.
3. Select "Do not retest this device"
4. Unplug the device
5. Open regedit (start->run->regedit)
6. Expand - HKLM (Local Machine)\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\EMDgmt
7. Find your device.
8. Change Device Status to 2
9. Change ReadSpeedKBs to 1000
10. Change WriteSpeedKBs to 1000
11. Plug in the device.
12. Enable Readyboost!!!!

~Matt

uh... isn't this pointless?
ReadyBoost for hard drives already exists.  It's called "page files".

Merry Christmas.

i'm convinced that this would make performance worse.

serishema wrote:

i'm convinced that this would make performance worse.

I agree.  I'm not sure how ReadyBoost works, but I suspect that it keeps a copy of the ReadyBoost file on the system drive, since pulling the flash drive out of the computer doesn't crash Windows.  (Read operations would still be faster, though, since it would just read from the flash memory.)  If that is how ReadyBoost works, then setting a hard drive as a ReadyBoost drive would be like maintaining identical copies of the same page file.

p.s. how does ReadyBoost work, anyway?

alwaysmc2 wrote:


p.s. how does ReadyBoost work, anyway?

[Start here] and follow the links

So rather than use a page file on a hard disk that's accessed through a fast IDE/SATA connection, you'd prefer to use a page file on a hard disk that's accessed through a slower USB2 connection? That's an interesting approach to increasing performance.

The whole point of readyboost is that it uses flash-based memory. External hard disks don't use flash-based memory. That's why they're not supported.

alwaysmc2 wrote:

I agree.  I'm not sure how ReadyBoost works, but I suspect that it keeps a copy of the ReadyBoost file on the system drive, since pulling the flash drive out of the computer doesn't crash Windows.  (Read operations would still be faster, though, since it would just read from the flash memory.)  If that is how ReadyBoost works, then setting a hard drive as a ReadyBoost drive would be like maintaining identical copies of the same page file.

Pretty much, yes. It writes your pagefile to your harddisk -and- to your USB device. If the USB device is still plugged in, it will read from the (faster) USB device, otherwise it'll just read from the harddisk, like in earlier versions of windows. Using a harddrive as a readyboost drive makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, since you wouldn't be getting the increased reading speed you get from a flash-based device.

So.... use an unsupported FLASH memory device like I did.  I had a few that were useless for ReadyBoost but this got them working. 




Plus, I'd like to know if I can use more than the 4gb restriction by changing some of the other registry entries at this path.  Even though MS developers say that performance is only noticeable on Vista machines w/ around 1gb memory... still cool to know. 
Regardless, it may save my laptop battery a bit.

So don't hate, participate.

Also, still trying to figure out if it's a performance gain if I'm not using a ReadyBoost device that meets their IO bandwidth requirements:

• The capacity of the removable media must be at least 256 MB (250 after formatting)
• Devices larger than 4 GB will have only 4 GB used for ReadyBoost
• The device should have an access time of 1ms or less
• The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device
• The device must have at least 235 MB of free space
  

  And get your learn on here:
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/sessionh.aspx?videoid=164
  
  
  
  and here:
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/sessionh.aspx?videoid=507 

 

serishema said:

i'm convinced that this would make performance worse.

You people need to learn how to not assume the worst in things, what pessimism! Why comment about it when you have no idea what it is?! I have enabled readyboost on my secondary hard drive and what do you know windows goes from 7 seconds complete loading time to 5. Don't tell me that using a secondary hard drive makes no sense. It makes perfect sense when my hard drive has a seek time of 0.04ms and has write speeds of 150MB per second. I am using a 4GB ram drive by Gigabyte. 1GB is dedicated to page file. Don't speak of what you don't know.

I have two HDDs in my desktop computer. Is there a way to ReadyBoost enable my second HDD (which I use for storage and backup purposes as of now)? Having 2 HDDs parallel should be as boosting as having 2 cores?

karnokd said:

I have two HDDs in my desktop computer. Is there a way to ReadyBoost enable my second HDD (which I use for storage and backup purposes as of now)? Having 2 HDDs parallel should be as boosting as having 2 cores?

Use the pagefile configuration.

karnokd said:

I have two HDDs in my desktop computer. Is there a way to ReadyBoost enable my second HDD (which I use for storage and backup purposes as of now)? Having 2 HDDs parallel should be as boosting as having 2 cores?

Are they the same size? Might want to consider RAID 0, unless reliability is a big factor

SlackmasterK said:

karnokd said:

*snip*

Are they the same size? Might want to consider RAID 0, unless reliability is a big factor

I found this site that provides a set of tips to fully optimize XP, but it's applicable very well to Vista and 7.

 

http://www.ge0ph.com/xptweaks.htm

 

It worked perfectly with all my machines.

PaoloM said:

SlackmasterK said:

*snip*

I found this site that provides a set of tips to fully optimize XP, but it's applicable very well to Vista and 7.

 

http://www.ge0ph.com/xptweaks.htm

 

It worked perfectly with all my machines.

+1. Though I feel more emphasis should be put on step 2, definitely the best one there.

Ok, so i did what you said but one problem arrises.

 

it says i need atleast 235 MB of free space on the disc... blah,blah,blah. The funny thing is that my hard drive has 210Gb free space... I dont know why it cant find a measily 235Mb but you know how Windows is. Any idea's? I have a Maxtor 4 Mini External Hard Drive.

 

PS. Email me back at andrew@lampert.ca

Does readyboost actually help at all?

intelman said:

Does readyboost actually help at all?

It all depends on the drives format. i.e. the readyboost system only works on ntfs, fat16 and fat32 (unless you have windows 7 then you may use exFAT). Depending on the storage devices format is whether or not you may use more than 4GB of it, because readyboost is saved as a file on the drive the format has everything to do with the optimized memory usage. FAT16 and FAT32 have a maximum file size of about 4GB, and with alot of the drives these days (especially flash and ext.HDs) are formatted FAT32 you're limited. If you can re-format the drive to ntfs (or exFAT if you have win 7) you do not have that file size limitation. As for how it works better.  Your paging serves as a pre-boot system (like us PC oldtimers "boot-disks") the pages it saves for "pre-booting are just that saved, and leaves your RAM for more actual new process demands. The system starts to become overfilled with those "saved pre-boots", then proceeds to overwrite the old ones causing page failures. Readyboot works as almost extra RAM as opposed to recognizing previous actions (like the pagefile sys does). Yes, pagefile works but, if you unbalance the memory usage it backfires and causes your PC to slow. Readyboost alows you to index in a way that alows for larger memory usable requests can be handled, rather than pagefile sys. that handles small memory page requests. If you can manage using both properly and efficiantlly (don't put $100. into hard drives when if you have an open port can put more RAM into your PC) it's effective, but don't waste effort or money on it.

Oh and don't allow your paging to take up too much memory, virtual memory does interfere with your used memory.