What Are the Specifications For a ReadyBoost Drive?

The specification for a ReadyBoost drive is that it must have a minimum transfer rate of 2.5 MB/s but for the "enhanced" ReadyBoost it is 5 MB/s for random 4K reads and 3 MB/s for random 512 Kb/s writes. There must also be a minimum of 230 MB free.

I have used a low cost USB drive from EagleTec and found that brand to be quite satisfactory. My suggestion is that you try a few different USB ports and temporarily disable the anti-virus program as this may be slowing it down. Once the drive is accepted then it will not matter if throughput slightly decreases.

The software that I use to conduct timing tests is Microsoft's Timethis program that reports times to the nearest one thousands of a second. It can be downloaded from he Microsoft site. This is run from a DOS box. A typical command is: Timethis copy bigfile X: /Y

Where bigfile is the full filename of a file that is at least several MB in size, X: is the drive letter of the USB drive and /Y is the answer Yes as this test must be done several times to obtain an average value as other background programs may be running. Then the transfer speed can be calculated. It should be repeated for a number of small files copied from a new temporary folder. A typical command would be: Timethis copy *.* X: /Y

To some extent, the speed of the CPU determines the throughput, the faster the better. If your tests show that the transfer rate is close to Microsoft's target then use Task Manager to stop some non-essential tasks and keep inserting the USB drive as the next test may pass.

Microsoft claims significant improvements in performance for some cases, and faster booting, as the latency of the USB drive is about 1 ms compared to about 9 ms for the hard disk. However in my tests there was very little difference. The news is that you can use a part of that drive for your backups.

(Expert=George_Skarbek)

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