Ready Boost is an operating system feature introduced with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. The best way to improve the functioning of a PC is to increase its memory as increased memory enables more applications to operate on the computer. But this is not possible in many PCs as they have a maximum limit of memory and to increase it will call for upgrading memory which is very costly and some machines have limited expansion capabilities which don't enable the expansion.

It is here that the Windows Vista comes to help us. It has introduced Windows Ready Boost, a new concept in adding memory to a system. It works by using flash memory, USB 2.0 drive, SD card, Compact Flash or any kind of portable massive flash storage as a drive for disk cache You can use non-volatile flash memory, such as that on a universal serial bus (USB) flash drive, to improve performance without having to add additional memory "under the hood." The flash memory device serves as an additional memory cache-that is, memory that the computer can access much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive. Windows Ready Boost relies on the intelligent memory management of Windows SuperFetch and can significantly improve system responsiveness.ReadyBoost

Windows Vista introduces Windows Ready Boost, a new concept in adding memory to a system. You can use non-volatile flash memory, such as that on a universal serial bus (USB) flash drive, to improve performance without having to add additional memory "under the hood."

Ready Boost is also used to facilitate SuperFetch, an updated version of Windows XP's prefacer .Using Ready Boost flash memory for caching allows Windows Vista to perform faster than random reads from the traditional drives. It is applied to all the disk content and not only to the page file .Ready Boost also includes logic to recognize large, sequential read requests and then allows these requests to be serviced by the hard drive.

When a compatible device is plugged in, the windows Auto play dialog box offers an additional option to speed up the process. An additional Ready boost tab is added where the drives amount of space to be used is configured and compresses all data that is placed on flash device. Ready Boost will also be able to use spare RAM on other networked Windows Vista's PCs.

For a device to be compatible and useful it must conform to the following requirements:

  • The capacity of the removable media must be at least 256 MB (250 after formatting)
  • Devices larger than 4 GB will have only 4 GB used for Ready Boost
  • The device should have an access time of 1 ms or less
  • The device must be capable of 2.5 MB/s read speeds for 4 KB random reads spread uniformly across the entire device and 1.75 MB/s write speeds for 512 KB random writes spread uniformly across the device
  • The device must have at least 235 MB of free space
  • NTFS, FAT16 and FAT32 are supported
  • The initial release of Ready Boost supports one device
  • The recommended amount of flash memory to use for Windows Ready Boost acceleration is one to three times the amount of random access memory (RAM) installed in your computer.

It's easy to use Windows Ready Boost. When a removable memory device such as a USB flash drive or a secure digital (SD) memory card is first inserted into a port, Windows Vista checks to see if its performance is fast enough to work with Windows Ready Boost. If so, you are asked if you want to use this device to speed up system performance. You can choose to allocate part of a USB drive's memory to speed up performance and use the remainder to store files.