ready boost for ubuntu?

[Redcard]

I was talking at one time to a microsoft guy about ReadyBoost. He laughed and said it was helpful, but most the effects are placebo in nature.

[3rdalbum]

Real RAM runs extremely fast; DDR2 and DDR3 data rates are really huge.

SATA, which is how your hard disks connect to the computer, is pretty fast but nowhere near what DDR2 can accomplish.

USB 2, which is how your flash drive connects, is a mere fraction of SATA's speed. It's a mere drip compared to the viscous stream of DDR2.

There's no way can Readyboost actually help. Why place a cache on a disk that's connected via a very slow bus? Better off putting the cache in a continuous block on the regular HDD.

Besides, Vista requires so much RAM compared to Ubuntu, that your low-RAM Ubuntu machine with no Readyboost would still run faster than Vista or 7 with Readyboost.

[Slim Odds]

The only benefit of the flash drive in these cases is the seek time. Pretty much zero for flash, but can be sometimes quite large for any spinning disk.

That's why it's hard to compare the two sometimes.

[killermist]

Where a flash drive would provide a "boost" to system performance would be to keep "frequently accessed" files where access time is significantly faster than the speed of a hard drive.

There are downsides to this.
Flash drives have a SLOW write rate. This may not be immediately noticeable for short writes because caching mitigates the delays. But getting into large numbers or volume of write the true speed of writing to USB flash is painfully apparent.
Anything important (and basically everything has to be treated as important) that gets written to the flash also has to be written sooner or later to the hard drive anyway. Any power failure before the data is pushed from flash to HDD is lost without some recovery system on the next boot to make sure flash content is pushed to HDD.

All that said, to implement this would be "very hard" at best, and that's if you have programmers actually interested in the (arguably) trivial gains.

As others have said, more memory and better tuned (or just more) memory based caching would do even better.

[kurt18947]

yeah that's the problem, this old laptop is already at it's max of 1 gig. I like to use it for tinkering and wondered about using my thumb drive for some extra ram.
been reading about some people feel it's useless and others say it performed a miracle resurrection on their's.
seen a few other sites say linux doesn't need it because it uses the memory etc much better than windows.

Here are a couple things you could do to determine of extra RAM might be helpful. Run the following command in a terminal: "free -m" or open "system monitor". "system monitor" location varies by distro. If using system monitor bear in mind that system monitor uses some RAM itself. See if swap is being used and if so, how much. Unless you have a memory intensive or several applications open, Ubuntu doesn't really require that much RAM. If you want to add RAM to an older system and new RAM is pretty expensive -which it can be for out-of-production systems - you might check auction sites. I bought a DIMM for a vintage notebook (brought it up to a capacious 512 MB. ) for < $10. Install it and immediately run memtest on it. Be sure the seller offers return/exchange if the test fails.

[mightyiam]

There's a solution in Ubuntu. It is called flashcache. Here's how I did it in my blog.

[oldos2er]

Old thread closed.