First Off: in case you haven't noticed, there is a thumb drive poll here - https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=281380 if you wish to add any input. I'm going to soon purchase a thumb drive and after a bad first experience with a cheap Kingston Data Traveler, am "only looking" at the following brands: Corsair Lacie OCZ Patriot Would love to hear any comments you have on these 4 brands - either here or in the poll. About ReadyBoost: Anyone using it ? I'm running a lower end dual core (AMD Turionx2) Vista32 with 3 gigs of DDR2 ram. If i purchase an additional thumb drive 2gig or 4 gig ?, and use it strictly for readyboost, will i notice much of a difference?? Thanks!
The first thing you should do, IMO, is to learn about what you want your drive to do. I wanted a drive that had read and write rates of X. Performance reviews then showed me which models achieved at or near X. Then I researched to see both product reviews and customer reviews on the brand/model I liked. After I was satisfied I bought it. If you don't state criteria other than "a good one" you will get what you get. If you state you want a drive with sustained XX write rate and XX read rate, then you will get recommendations for that specifically. I don't know about ReadyBoost, but when you carry your project on a thumb drive, and work on your project from the thumb drive, speed becomes a huge issue. It means when you save something (a spreadsheet etc) you have to wait perhaps 6 seconds on average drives, and almost instant on good drives. Now save quite a lot, and time adds up. ReadyBoost I would think would be one of those things you want the best write and read rates for. I chose the corsair flash voyager. It meets and exceeds my expectations. OCZ has some models that are also quite fast from my use, but I think the voyager is faster. I was suprised that a 4gb HP thumb drive was really fast as well. Much faster than what you find at Best Buy type stores. HTH. Sul.
Hey There Sully While i have been completely satisfied with my now 1 year old MSI laptop, if i can improve it's performance using readyboost i will so 1 thumb drive would be for that. The other would be multi-purpose: - the odd file transfer - some file/folder backup - running portable apps such as Iron Chrome if i need to and am away from my laptop
If your system has 2 or more gigs of RAM, performance increase from a USB drive used for Readyboost starts to fall flat. It helps systems that are underpowered (1 gig of RAM)..once you get to 2 gigs, you don't notice much of a boost, you have 3 gigs.... Also older machines benefit from it more. Todays faster machines, with hard drives that are quite faster than a few years ago, with larger cache...improvement from using Readyboost is dimished again. You mention a laptop, if it has a slower 4,200rpm or sorta slow 5,400rpm drive, you may notice a little bump.
Even on my '06 Omen ReadyBoost works to noticeably boost launch speeds of my applications. So it works for me.
Thanks for the comments. I think i might just go ahead and pick up 2 anyways to try out readyboost. As for brands, i really like the look of the lacie's Cool and easy to carry around! The specs look ok.
Indeed, very clever design! Tobacco ReadyBoost didn't affect my Vista machine at all (Asus Intel Core2 CPU T7400 @2.16 GHz RAM: 2GB). To have a couple of these around it always helps whether you use ReadyBoost or not.
a) Two years ago, I had a bad experience with Patriot/2GB. b) My Corsair Voyager/128 GB has been very reliable. I haven't tried Lacie and OCZ...
Again, thanks for the comments. My readings are telling me the same. Positive thoughts on OCZ and Corsair. Patriot seems to get mixed reviews. Wonder if Lacie is a new player as i'm still searching for feedback on them.
