Readyboost Flash Drives

What is ReadyBoost?

ReadyBoost is a feature of Windows Vista that will also be making an appearance in Windows 7, and possibly future versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system. To understand ReadyBoost, one must first understand a bit about how Windows works.

Since Windows 95, every version of Windows has used the hard drive as a sort of scratchpad. This is a very, very basic interpretation of what is typically called 'Caching'. Basically, as Windows sorts through the files needed to run programs and loads them into memory, or RAM, it will often run out of space. To address this, Windows uses a part of the hard drive instead. Unfortunately, a physical hard drive is not nearly as quick to access, read, or write, as RAM.

The idea behind ReadyBoost is that, since the USB communication standard is inherently much faster than any hard drive interface, why not use any extra thumb drives the user may have laying around instead of the hard drive?

Microsoft, realizing that the majority of computer users would not make use of something that was not either absolutely necessary or easy to integrate, made it extremely easy to activate the ReadyBoost feature. Simply plug in a USB thumb drive that is ReadBoost compatible and Windows will ask if you would like to use ReadyBoost. The system will set a small part of the flash drive up for its use with no more questions for the end user.

ReadyBoost can be a fast, cheap way to speed up a system that just needs a little more memory.