ultimate victory, maximum power

I was recently in the market for a new flash drive. Having recently moved to Microsoft Windows Vista as my primary operating system I figured I may as well get a drive that supports Vista’s new ReadyBoost feature. For this reason I chose the Corsair Flash Voyager GT 8GB.

What is ReadyBoost?

ReadyBoost is a disk caching technology which is only available in Microsoft Windows Vista. ReadyBoost allows any attached memory device, USB stick, compact flash card etc. to be used as additional system memory. Although data throughput is always slower, the data seek times of these devices can be faster than a conventional hard disk drive. This is beneficial in certain use cases having many small random reads. Where the operating system needs to access data sequentially it will instead use the hard disk to make use of the greater data throughput.

My Experience

When I first inserted the Corsair Flash Voyager GT into my computer I elected to enable the drive for ReadyBoost. Before you can use ReadyBoost, Vista performs a speed test on the drive to ensure it meets a number of performance criteria. Most common (cheap) USB flash drives will never pass this test. Even my Voyager GT drive, which is specified as being ReadyBoost compatible, took a few attempts to pass this performance test. After Windows Vista passes the drive for ReadyBoost it then creates a hidden system file on the drive in a similar way to the conventional hard disk paging file. From this point forward Windows Vista sees this file and enables ReadyBoost whenever the drive is inserted into the computer.

So far I am happy with the performance of this drive and ReadyBoost. I find that Vista most actively uses the flash memory when I am web browsing. Particularly when I am viewing a site with many small pictures. The usual thrashing of my hard disk as the small files are written/read from disk has been replaced by the blue LED flicker of my flash drive.

Although ReadyBoost is an interesting “techie” feature, I am sure the performance benefit is minimal at best. Regardless of this fact, I am happy with the Voyager GT as it is by far the fastest USB flash drive I have ever used.