FSX/readyboost drive/performance

My understanding is that a ready boost drive is a usb drive that vista uses
to dump data to, rather than a hard disk as the readyboost drive is
considered to be faster than the hard disk.

So if my comment above is true, and I can now buy a 32gb readyboost drive
for $70, is it a good idea to install games such as FsX onto a readyboost
drive, and get better performance than using a HDD...

Readyboost is a good thing for systems with less than 1gb of memory and
really slow hard drives, but over 1gb it doesn't seem to help much. However
the actual issue is USB stick performance as a disk drive.

On my system (Vista32, 2gb memory), using PerformanceTest 6.1:

EIDE drive:
sequential read=49.6MBytes/Sec, Seq write=53.7MBytes/Sec, Random
r/w=3.41MBytes/Sec

SATA drive:
sequential read=57.7MBytes/Sec, Seq write=48.5MBytes/Sec, Random
r/w=2.59MBytes/Sec

USB2.0-connected external hard drive (Buffalo) I use for backups:
sequential read=20.5MBytes/Sec, Seq write=20.3MBytes/Sec, Random
r/w=2.91MBytes/Sec

1gb Memorex memory stick, plugged into a USB2.0 port:
sequential read=10.3MBytes/Sec, Seq write=0.74MBytes/Sec, Random
r/w=0.13MBytes/Sec

The memory stick seemed really slow so I ran the test several times with the
same results. Now my stick is a fairly old one so newer ones may be a lot
faster, but the point is that you would have to check and see what your
stick gives, you may end up without any performance increase.

Firstly Readyboost only works up to 4GB in size so if you bought a 32GB usb
stick to use for readyboost then only the first 4gb would be used by the
system and the other 28gb would be wasted.

Secondly Readyboost works as a temp drive to cache data the operating system
thinks you might need, for example certain files for programs you might
regularly open so you dont actually install programs to the readyboost usb
drive.

Lastly, and this is more in responce to the other posters responce about
drive speeds, the benefit of flash storage over hard disks isnt read/write
speeds but instant seek times for a certain piece of data. So instead of
with your conventional hard drive having do spin the platter around to the
right location before it can start reading, flash can instantly access any
sector on the disk making it very quick for random reads of small pieces of
data. For sequencial blocks of data, eg a 700mb video file hard drives are
still the quickest storage medium as the disk only has to seek once to find
the start of the file and is then reading a continuous stream of data as the
disk turns.

ReadyBoost is, as I understand it, just extra Cache RAM, and not really
that great a thing. Like others have said it's good if you have a 1gig
system ram, but anything over that it doesn't really help that much. The
other problem is USB drives (HDD or Flash RAM sticks) just aren't that
fast vs. your internal drive, so there's really no reason to install
anything onto an external drive and expect better performance.

Now, if you have an eSATA hard drive, that "should" be as fast or faster
than your internal drive, so you could install an application externally
that way, but otherwise it's important to remember that the hard drive
inside your system is your slowest component, USB drives are slower than
that so more system ram means you won't have to use those other slower
components as often.

Confused? Read a book.

[Venator69]

It is not actually the raw drivespeed that shoud give an advantage, but the very low access times. Where the best harddrives get around 9ms, usb sticks and other flash based apparatus can nowadays easily go below 1ms access time.

If readyboost puts a lot of small files in the aggregrated Readyboost.sf cache file on the stick, it can actually read them quite a bit faster than a harddrive can, because it totally eliminates all header seek and access moments (which can be a lot if qou combine it, 9ms is an utopia when you consider this)