After yesterday’s ReadyBoost post, I decided to truly put the feature to the test. Hey, what I perceive as a noticeable performance improvement might just be old age setting in, right? A little empirical analysis and a scientific approach might be in order here. To test the impact of ReadyBoost, I fired up the Vista partition on my Samsung Q1P, which has a 1 GHz Pentium M processor and 1 GB of RAM. For my ReadyBoost scenario, I added a 2 GB SanDisk Cruzer USB drive that labeled ‘Enhanced for ReadyBoost’. Using the CrystalMark 2004R2 software application, I ran the benchmarks both with and without the ReadyBoost device.
Without ReadyBoost, the Samsung Q1P scored a 14873 overall; quite interesting since the new Q1 Ultra scored 13112 using the same software, which is almost a 14% overall difference, but I digress. ;)
With ReadyBoost, the same system scored 15663 overall, for a relative overall increase of about 5.3%. So where does ReadyBoost really provide the ‘boost’? I did some reviewing of the granular level results and here’s where CrystalMark sees the biggest boost:
HDD
Overall Benchmark without ReadyBoost: 2112
Overall with ReadyBoost: 2922 (+38%)
Random Read (64K) without ReadyBoost: 3.08 MB/s (123 CrystalMark points)
Random Read (64K) with ReadyBoost: 21.36 MB/s (854 CrystalMark points)
There’s little to no significant difference in any of the other benchmarks; it’s all in the system reads of data from the ‘hard drive’. I put hard drive in quotes because the system is also reading data from the ReadyBoost cache when it can in that scenario; that’s essentially what ReadyBoost is: a high speed cache.
Keeping this exercise in perspective, you may have ReadyBoost results that are better or worse than what I found. The experience will vary due to a number of variables: system specifications, speed of USB flash drive, etc… Overall, I think ReadyBoost is worth taking advantage of for the cost. You should be able to find a USB flash drive that’s fast enough to use for as little as $20 or $30. Ideally, I subscribe to the thought that adding more RAM is the best investment you can make to speed up a system. However, with UMPCs we’re limited to how much RAM can actually be recognized and used; for my Q1P, I’m maxed out at 1 Gigabyte, so ReadyBoost is an inexpensive and easy way to gain just bit more performance.
If you want the full results of my test in an HTML format, I’ve got them right here:
- Benchmark results without ReadyBoost
- Benchmark results with ReadyBoost
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