Originally posted by mike_311:
so windows 7 has the ability to use a flash drive as ram. my pc is lacking in ram (4gb) photoshop can be brutal at times. i can go by a 8gb stick for $10. anyone try this out and how well does it work? i dont have any lying around to give it a go. |
Mike, there is a common misconception that a flash drive can be used as "extra" ram in Windows 7. That's simply not the case. It can't be used as extra RAM...meaning system RAM or memory, but it IS used to help speed up a system by adding extra storage space that becomes a dedicated cache drive when you enable ReadyBoost.
Windows memory management uses your hard disk to cache data from memory to the drive when it needs to load other information into memory that you need access to right now. Say you have a image viewer open and it's just sitting there in memory, and you want to launch a program that requires extra memory. Windows will not close that image viewer, but that data in memory is just sitting there at the moment doing nothing so Windows will cache that data to your portion of your drive that acts a virtual memory. A traditional hard drive is normally faster than flash ram when it comes to large chunks of sequential data (meaning stored all together on your drive and not fragmented across the drive), but flash memory is faster at random access speeds. Windows memory management is smart enough to know where the best place is to pull the data from...the drive or flash memory.
32 bit versions of Windows can only utilize and see 4 GB of system RAM (actually only uses about 3.2 GB). Installing a flash drive with ReadyBoost enabled will STILL only allow Windows 7 the ability to use that exact amount of system RAM, but it WILL be a faster cache for commonly used programs that are probably fragmented across your drive. Instead of moving a lot of that data from actual system memory to your hard drive it moves it...caches it to your flash drive which again has faster access speeds when reading random non-sequential data.
64 bit verions of Windows can go above the 4 GB limit, and Windows memory management can deal with MUCH higher amount of RAM as long as your motherboard supports it. Some mother boards can only handle 8 GB max, others 16 GB. If you have motherboard that can handle 128 GB of system memory...the 64 bit version of Windows can see it and use it. As Scalvert said....system memory will always be faster than a flash drive, BUT you are not using the flash drive as system memory as I have explained. It's a cache drive that saves time with transfering data to and from memory which is faster than writing it back to the drive in most situations. It's an in between.
If you have a flash drive of say 8GB storage space you would plug it into your USB port, and if you have a Sandisk cruzer or something with the U3 launcher on it...put it in a system that can read it and remove that software so it's just a plain Jane storage device. Next...put it into your Windows 7 USB and format it using NTFS. This will allow you to use more than the 4 GB limit of the FAT32 formatting. ReadyBoost compresses the data with usually around a 2:1 compression rate into one cached file. This means if you have an 8GB Flash Drive you will actually be able to cache 16 GB of data to it. Once you format it, you right click on the device in My Computer and go to the properties. You will see a tab for ReadyBoost there. That is where you enable it to be used as a cache drive and set the amount of space you want to use. That's really all there is to it.
You should also make sure by going to your system services in Windows 7 and making sure that SuperFetch is enable and starts automatically. SuperFetch is a utility that pre-loads commonly used program data by YOU that the system learns over time and lets Windows cache these programs etc. for faster boot up times and access to your commonly used programs quicker through caching.
I hope this info helps.
Dave |
