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Wictor Wilén

Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) - SharePoint 2010 | Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - SharePoint Server MVP | Author

Using Windows Vista ReadyBoost on an SD-card

Posted at 2007-02-09 01:44 by Wictor Wilén in Windows Vista with 12 comments.

Windows Vista contains a performance booster functionality called  ReadyBoost which really can improve the performance of your Windows Vista system. In fact, ReadyBoost, is one of the top five Windows Vista features according to Ed Bott.

In short ReadyBoost caches programs on a flash drive to speed up your Vista, reports are that a program that previously started in 10 seconds will now start in 2-4 seconds.

Almost all articles I have read on this subject says that you should use an USB-stick as your ReadyBoost flash drive, but it will work with any kind of flash drive, like an SD-card.

Using an SD card is for me much more better since I have an Dell XPS m1210 laptop. Having an USB-stick pointing out will almost certainly destroy the stick or the USB port (done it before...) but the built-in SD-card reader on the laptop allows me to have the SD card in the reader all the time without worrying to destroy it.

Configuring ReadyBoost on an SD-card

Comments and trackbacks

#  SD Card Brand by Jose
Screenshot from websnpr Which SD card are you using?
#  Re: SD Card Brand by Wictor
Screenshot from websnpr Hello Jose, I have tried several SanDisk SD cards; standard and Ultra II.The standard card hard to go throught the ReadyBoost test a few times before it worked fine. I would choose an Ultra II or Extreme card from SanDisk since the standard has not that good performance.
#  SD Card Reader by Mark Gabrielson
I hsve a Dell XPS 420 w/4GB RAM and a 19-in-1 card reader. I purchased a San Disk 2 GB Ultra II SD Card but Vista says ythat it does not have the performance required. I tried the test 5 or 6 times and tried two different cards. The card is rated at 10MB/s. Is the card reader the bottleneck?
#  Re: SD Card Reader by Wictor
Screenshot from websnpr I have a similar, which had be tested a few times which made it work. 10MB/s seems fair enough, is that the speed that Vista found out? You can check the actual speed in the registry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\EMDMmgmt\. The sub-keys represents each tested usb device, look at the ReadSpeedKBs and WriteSpeedKBs keys.
#  Re: SD Card Reader by Mark Gabrielson
I checked the registry entries and one card ran at (1,872) KBps and the other was (1,853) KBps both well below the advertised 10,000 KBps (10 MBps). My WD 500 GB USB drive tested out at (1,137) KBps. All the write speeds were set at 0 presumably because the read speeds were so low the system did not bother to write test.
#  Re: SD Card Reader by Wictor
Screenshot from websnpr Heya, 1.8 is to slow. The limit is 2.5 MB/sec throughput for random reads of 4KB of the device and 1.75MB/sec for writing 512KB data. My guess is that your card reader is the bottleneck as you describes, try to upgrade firmware/drivers. I've experienced similar with external USB 1 readers.
#  ReadyBoost memory by ReadyBoost
Screenshot from websnpr For those who don't have an sd-card reader you can find a list of ReadyBoost compatible USB flash memory here: http://www.readyboostmemory.com/
#  Re: ReadyBoost memory by Wictor
Screenshot from websnpr Thanks for the tip
#  problem by Zero
Hi, can anyone help me? i recently bought an sd card and it worked with readyboost, but after some time, i tried opening the disk (where there used to be a file called "readyboost") but i couldn't, instead a message appeared and said: "please insert a disk into sd card", does anyone know if this is affecting how readyboost works, and how to fix it? thanks a lot!
#  Re: problem by Wictor
Screenshot from websnpr Hi, have you tried to format the drive?
#  problem by Eric
I had a similar problem, and I formatted the drive and now readyboost doesn't work. Anyone know how to fix it?
#  problem by Morrell
Screenshot from websnpr i was just using my SD card for different stuff and now i dont have anything to use it for and i found out about this but i can't use it because it says that it does not have the required performence characteristics to use as RAM
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