24 October, 2011

Readyboost more than 4GB?

The 536,870,912 byte (512×2 20 ) capacity of t...Image via Wikipedia
24-Oct-2011, 8.30am:

Today I discovered that Readyboost size can be extended to more than 4GB!

I was actually not expecting this, as much of the articles found on the web sets the limit of Readyboost cache memory size to 4GB, no more than that. But as I have tried today on my laptop (Probook 4430s) and 2 others desktop PCs (GX280 and GX520 models), the size is no longer limited to 4GB.

I plugged in one 8GB thumb drive on the GX280 machine, and dedicated the whole drive to Readyboost, and it was accepted. The amount recognized is about 7584MB (7.47GB).

On the GX520 machine, I put in two: a 4GB drive, and one that is 8GB. The 4GB drive came up with about 3804GB (3.76GB), while the 8GB drive reserved about 7562MB (7.45GB) space.

On my laptop, I employed an 8GB thumb drive, and a 16GB Sd card. Both being dedicated to Readyboost, the 8GB drive gave a 7562MB (7.45GB) available size, while the 16GB SD card came up with about 15196MB (14.9GB) available space.

If what I'm thinking is correct, this is indicating that we no longer need a very huge RAM size. Just the baseline 4GB fitting will do. And if you need to jack that up, then buy one 16GB SD card, plug it in, set it to dedicated Readyboost usage, and you have a very huge cache memory to play with!

Of course, this is all that I am seeing right now, but before 64-bit, or even Windows 7 or Vista, RAM size was limited to 2/3GB, and the 'extra' that you may have physically isn't used! That is no longer the case these days. And while 32-bit memory addressing is causing the limitation of using up to 4GB RAM only, with 64-bit, that is not the case.

And we are no longer talking about RAM being expensive, but between adding RAM and using SD card or thumb drive, I would be avoiding RAM-adding when I already have 4GB, which could mean dismantling the laptop casing or opening the desktop chassis, when I could just simply plug in an alternative thumb drive or SD card. We actually should be talking about which is cheaper and faster to employ, with less hassle and less opportunity for error and mishandling, etc., etc., etc.

So how's that? Where will this Readyboost technology lead us?
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