Readyboost Flash Drive in Vista

[€uro]

I have used a USB flash drive pen to give an extra 1.5Gb of RAM supposedly to my vista OS. A friend said that this would be slower than increasing the virtual drive used by windows on the HDD. I  thought that the HDD was the slowest thing on the computer & that the flash memory would be faster. I have since uninstalled the flash drive & set vista to automatically manage the page size. I would like to know other opinions on this?

[shoarthing]

 . .  interesting idea: at the moment I understand most USB2 pendrives to be pretty slow by modern HDD standards - mebbe 10~ish MB/s write, 15 read.

HDDs are indeed the performance bottleneck for most folk with most tasks - suggest, if this is a concern for you, you consider frittering away the hard-earned on a 16MB cache Raptor for your OS; if you are really serious, devote another one of these for virtual drive/scratch drive use.

[€uro]

I will wait on any major hardware changes because my Abit NF7 mobo has some life left. The mobo only does sata 1. When I fit a new mobo I will upgrade the HDDs, seriously.

[b99]

Starting with windows xp you can load the kernel in RAM as instead of pagefile.sys (swap file). You need over 512Mb ram or more. It improves speed/performance.
Flash drive is not ram. For all practical purposes is just another drive for the OS, and a very slow one.
Bad idea.

[Graham]

I agree with B99.  If you have enough memory you can configure part of it as a virtual drive and it will be far faster than using a hardrive.  Using USB is not a good idea, they are way too slow.

[FMassa]

Flash RAM have a faster file access time, but as a rule it slower with reading/writing ops.