August 1, 2008: ReadyBoost Blues
About a week ago, I noted in the winsat article that I was trying to get ReadyBoost to work on my laptop, which runs Vista Ultimate. The promise of ReadyBoost is better performance, mainly when invoking applications. I’ve given up on it, but will record a few notes here for your amusement and my later reference.
Into my aging Thinkpad T42 (type 2378-FVU, now exactly 4 years old), I installed a Delkin ‘eFilm Pro’ DDCFPROCB-AD Cardbus Adapter and a RiData Lighting Series 233x 8GB CF card. I ran the following Winsat tests (as documented by James O’Neill), twice - once formatted as Fat32, and again when formatted as NTFS:
winsat disk –read –ran –ransize 4096 –drive F -v
FAT result: 5.99 MB/s
NTFS result: 8.46 MB/s
winsat disk –write –ran –ransize 524288 –drive F -v
FAT: 5.01 MB/s
NTFS: 5.01 MB/s
These results are not blazing fast, but they do exceed the requirements for ReadyBoost, which are 2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes. You can find documentation of those requirements, and a lot more, in Tom Archer’s excellent FAQ. Tom got his answers directly from Matt Ayers, the Microsoft Program Manager who owns the ReadyBoost feature. So this stuff is straight frm the horse’s mouth.
OK. So my hardware meets the performance standard, but Vista will not give me a ReadyBoost tab in the CF drive’s properties. Bummer.
And with a bit more digging, I found the reason:
Well, part of the reason anyway. Device Manager does properly identify both the CF card and the Delkin cardbus adapter:
So, I’m in a quandary. Is this an issue with the CF card, or the Cardbus adapter, or something about my system’s chipset? It is impossible to tell. There just isn’t much information on the web (I have linked all the best stuff in this article, and it is not enough). Plenty of info about ReadyBoost for USB devices, but not much when it comes to this intersection of ReadyBoost, CF, adapter, and motherboard chipset. I won’t keep buying devices in the hopes that some combination of them will work. So, I’m throwing in the towel on this one, until better information is available.
Here are a couple of sites which do document working ReadyBoost hardware, though none had the complete combination of information I needed:
- Techcrater list of tested ReadyBoost speeds.
- Grant Gibson’s works/doesn’t work list.
- Ed Bott’s shorter list of tested USB devices.
