Understand Ready Boost and whether it will Speed Up your System Windows 7 supports Windows Ready Boost. This feature uses external USB flash drives as a hard disk cache to improve disk read perfor¬mance. Supported external storage types include USB thumb drives, SD cards, and CF cards. Since Ready Boost will not provide a perfor¬mance gain when the primary disk is an SSD, Windows 7 disables Ready Boost when reading from an SSD drive. External storage must meet the following requirements: Capacity of at least 256 MB, with at least 64 kilobytes (KB) of free space.The 4-GB limit of Windows Vista has been removed. At least a 2.5 MB/sec throughput for 4-KB random reads At least a 1.75 MB/sec throughput for 1-MB random writes The most effective way to determine whether a specific flash drive meets Ready Boost requirements is to test it. Windows Vista and Windows 7 automati¬cally test removable storage when attached. If a storage device fails the test, Windows will automatically retest the storage on a regular basis. Some devices will show the phrase “Enhanced for Windows Ready Boost” on the packaging, which means that Microsoft has tested the device specifically for this feature. If you connect a flash drive that meets these requirements, AutoPlay will provide Ready Boost as an option. Alternatively, you can configure Ready Boost by right-clicking the device in Windows Explorer, clicking Properties, and then clicking the ReadyBoost tab. The only configuration option is to configure the space reserved for the cache. You must reserve at least 256 MB. Larger caches can improve performance, but the ReadyBoost cache cannot be greater than 4 GB on a FAT32 file system or greater than 32 GB on an NTFS file system. Windows 7 use the Windows Super Fetch algorithm to determine which files should be stored in the cache. Super Fetch monitors files that users access (including system files, application files, and documents) and pre¬loads those files into the Ready Boost cache. All files in the cache are encrypted using 128-bit AES if the flash storage device is removable, but hardware manufacturers can choose to disable encryption on internal, non-removable Ready Boost devices. Because the Ready Boost cache stores a copy of the files, the flash drive can be removed at any point without affecting the computer—Windows will simply read the original files from the disk. Ready Boost provides the most significant performance improvement under the following circumstances: The computer has a slow hard disk drive. Computers with a primary hard disk Windows Experience Index (WEI) subscore lower than 4.0 will see the most significant improvements. The flash storage provides fast, random, non-sequential reads. Sequential read speed is less important. The flash storage is connected by a fast bus. Typically, USB memory card readers are not sufficiently fast. However, connecting flash memory to an internal memory card reader might provide sufficient performance. Computers with fast hard disks (such as 7,200- or 10,000-RPM disks) might realize minimal performance gains because of the already high disk I/O. Ready Boost will read files from the cache only when doing so will improve performance. Hard disks outperform flash drives during sequential reads, but flash drives are faster during non-sequential reads (because of the latency caused when the drive head must move to a different disk sector)therefore, Ready Boost reads from the cache only for non-sequential reads. Ready Boost creates a disk cache file named Ready Boost.sf cache in the root of the flash drive. The file is immediately created for the full size of the specified cache. However, Windows will gradually fill the space with cached content. To monitor Ready Boost performance, use the System ToolsPerformanceMonitoring ToolsPerformance Monitor tool in the Computer Management console and add the Ready Boost Cache counters. These counters enable you to monitor how much of the cache is currently being used and when the cache is read from or written to. But it does not tell you exactly what performance benefit you are achieving by using Ready Boos
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 13:38:26 +0000
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