Readyboost and seperate Page drive... any point?


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In a modern i7 based system that has, lets say... 6GB of ram..

Would there be any point in having a dedicated Readyboost drive? Or a dedicated drive (not partition) for swap file usage?

Would there be any performance increase at all over a system that has no readyboost and the os/page/applications all on one partition the size of the entire harddrive?

If so, what about a system that has 9GB of ram?

Not sure if these questions would apply to Windows 7 as well since its still in Beta right now.

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I have a Servers with 32GB RAM & 12GB RAM,

I observe OS(Linux 64B) use 0% Swap, but it still required to have swap file system !

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It's always made sense to put the page volume on a physically separate disk (on a separate IO channel) as the system could read / write to that whilst doing simultaneous reads & writes to the system volume. As you say, no point in doing that on a separate partition.

Regarding ReadyBoost, I really don't think there are any gains to be made on a system with that much RAM and a CPU that fast & powerful.

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It's always made sense to put the page volume on a physically separate disk (on a separate IO channel) as the system could read / write to that whilst doing simultaneous reads & writes to the system volume. As you say, no point in doing that on a separate partition.

Yes I know, I never understood why some people say to use a separate partition and why Linux does this by default... at least Ubuntu does.

Anyway, so is there any point in having a separate page drive on a system with that kinda cpu and ram for general desktop use and gaming? Possibly some very minor video encoding/development/CAD as well but rarely.

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Yes I know, I never understood why some people say to use a separate partition and why Linux does this by default... at least Ubuntu does.

The reason, I am told (and it sounds reasonable) that Linux has swap as a separate partition is to avoid the double hit on file I/O. It reads or writes directly to a section, rather than having to be translated into a position in a file stored in an NTFS (or ext3) filesystem.

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ReadyBoost is useless past 2GB of RAM anyway. It's more aimed at systems with less than 1GB. I ran ReadyBoost on my last system that had 2GB of DDR1 and I didn't notice any improvements.

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I see

Ok then, what about having a physically seperate drive just for the pagefile if you have 6 or more gigs of ram on your system?

I think it'd still be pointless. With 8GB of ram on my system I don't even use a pagefile and my system runs great.

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