My Readyboost Performance run results
I have a Toshiba R25-S3513 Convertable Tablet. It has 3 GB of RAM with a maximum of 4 that it can support. It's a Core 2 Duo (64bit) running Vista x86. I had the 4GB Patriot XT XPorter High Speed USB Flash. The flash drive is 233x I think and about 32MB/s. It's supposedly one of the fastest on the market. I was using it as my ReadyBoost Flash.
I didn't feel like I was really getting good performance plus I noticed I was often pegging both processors out when I accessed the RSS sidebar gadget within the Sidebar. Hmmmm...
So I ran some performance tests with Performance Test 6.1 from PassMark. I had the results I had suspected in my gut but they were very suprising. Below are the results. In synopsis note that:
- My Readyboost had a significant impact on what the test thought was Disk Random Seek + R/W. Obviously it was coming directly from the USB flash.
- My Readyboost significantly reduced almost all my other performance tests and overall provided a reduced user experience
- The RSS Reader Gadget, the one that comes with Vista, was a pig even just running inside the Gadget Sidebar without me interacting with it, and had a major impact on my performance.
- The RSS Reader Gadget was not a pig if I removed it from the Sidebar and let it run on the desktop.
So... all in all. I'm still not satisfied with how the machine performed overall compared to some published baselines on lesser machines. I even went so far as to strip out every running process and service that was not entirely essential and rerun the test. I had no appreciable change in performance versus my two best overall benchmark results- No Readyboost with Sidebar and no RSS Reader and No Readyboost with no Sidebar (also no RSS Reader).
My determination, if you are short on ram and doing lots of paging off to the disk Readyboost may hel out but seemingly on my machine at the expense of other performance activities. But otherwise I found it reduced my performance overall.
I'll soon try wiht this machine running Vista x64 and let you know the results. I hope that running an x64 OS on the x64 Machine to see a significant improvement in my results. But we will see.
Click the image below to see the full size.
