Virtual Memory (revisited) - DDR3

[EnJoY]

I have actually been using "ready boost" with my win 7 x64 and it does make a difference on loading times and shut down, i have 4 gb of ram on my AM3 rig in my sig, i also use ready boost on my 939 opti rig with win7 and xp (can only use ready boost in win7, so you cant use the drive at all when your in xp), anyway when you use ready boost it disables your pagefile, and uses the usb drive to do it, i have an 8gb OCZ Rally in both of them, and it makes a fairly large difference on the the 939 rig with 2gigs of ram, seems to help almost everything load/close, on the AM3 rig like i said it is mostly just with windows starting and shutting down, but also i can do thing on the desktop as soon as it loads instead of clicking on something and having that one short initial pause as windows is still loading a few things, also my drive dosnt seem to get "thrashed" using ready boost like it can sometimes w/o it, the hdd access is a lot less in other words, i would think that assigning your pagefile to a large amount of ram would b WAY faster then a USB drive would ever even think of being

Dragon

This is all great, but how is your USB drive faster than your hard drive? Especially for those of us using Raptor's or SSD's, keeping the page file where it is would be a lot faster than any USB drive.

[DualCpuUser]

This is all great, but how is your USB drive faster than your hard drive? Especially for those of us using Raptor's or SSD's, keeping the page file where it is would be a lot faster than any USB drive.

Please remember about TIME and development.
1) You identify a problem exists (performance).
2) You design a long term solution, "Design Spec"
3) Then the software has to be written, tested, released.
4) 3 years have now gone by and we have SSD's.

Readyboost wasn't focused to fix performance issues with SSD's; it was to improve laptops and desktops with slow HD's (laptops are/were 5400 RPM) with small amounts of disk cache. So every disk IO was/is a huge perf hit.

There is: ReadyBoot; ReadyDrive (Hybrid HD) and SuperFetch; they all do differrent things at different times to help with user experience and effectively use RAM.

To ALL:
RAM DISKS are stupid, don't use them.
Windows may report memory as "free" or "available" In simple terms; That isn't true, most ram is on the standby list and if pages that were ONCE used for something (for example an EXE/DLL) then those pages are pulled back into the working set of the new or running process and no diskreads will occour.

PageFile(s):
Put the pagefile on the OS partition and do RAM_SIZE+1GB (easy math), so you can create crashdumps for MS if you ever need one, or if you are in "customer improvement"; they are uploaded and analyzed for the crash cause. if 3rd party driver, that company is notified to fix their driver, etc.

HD are so large the space taken up isn't noticed; If it used it isn't used, so who cares if its there; but when it is needed its there for the memory-manager. You don't want to put the system into a thrashing state, whem memory pressure is high. A lot of 3rd party drivers and applications don't handle (NOMEM) being returned; with no page file, virtual address can become fragmented and the MM can't move things around if required.

[purecain]

good answer...

[[XC] gomeler]

This is all great, but how is your USB drive faster than your hard drive? Especially for those of us using Raptor's or SSD's, keeping the page file where it is would be a lot faster than any USB drive.

You don't understand ReadyBoost do you? It isn't about throughput, it is about read/write speed latency. Readyboost is used to cache files that can then be read instantly when compared to a rotating HDD. It isn't meant to cache an entire application to be read off the USB drive, just frequently used small files. No, I haven't tested it but in theory it should boost performance.

[DualCpuUser]

You don't understand ReadyBoost do you? It isn't about throughput, it is about read/write speed latency. Readyboost is used to cache files that can then be read instantly when compared to a rotating HDD. It isn't meant to cache an entire application to be read off the USB drive, just frequently used small files. No, I haven't tested it but in theory it should boost performance.

It doesn't do anything with 'files', it deals in pages.