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Don’t get ripped off when looking to buy a USB pen drive for use with Windows 7′s ReadyBoost cache.

Caveat Emptor

Not all ‘Hi-Speed” USB flash drives are high speed. Unwary consumers can be caught out by misleading words or, as in most cases, completely missing information about the USB flash drive’s read/write specifications or it’s ability to support ReadyBoost.

If you don’t have any information about a flash drive’s random read and write speeds or if there is no confirmation that the drive is suitable for use with ReadyBoost then there is no way to know that you might be buying a painfully slow lemon. You’ll only find out when you get your shiny new pen drive home, plug it in to your PC and immediately go into catatonic shock when you see the blatant lack of performance. There are fast “Hi-Speed” flash drives and there are woefully slow “Hi-Speed” flash drives. This article tells you what you need to know so you don’t get stuck with a next to useless, woefully slow “Hi-Speed” flash drive.

“USB 2.0 compliant” means exactly that; it does not mean “USB 2.0 capable” or “designed to USB specification revision 2.0″. If the USB component is designed for USB 1.1 then it is automatically “USB 2.0 compliant”, which does not mean that the USB component operates at USB 2.0 speeds. Read this article to help avoid being sold slow, out of date rubbish that you neither need nor want.

In addition, manufacturer specifications usually refer to sequential read and write access speed, but Windows ReadyBoost measures large volumes of small random accesses. That means you can pay through the nose for a supposed top of the range flash drive and ReadyBoost might still reject it.

To make matters worse, it is highly likely that you know far more about technology than the snot-nosed ubergeek at your local PC chain store so don’t let the mongrels tell you, “Of course they work with Windows 7. We use them all the time.” Well, yes, they use them all the time, but do they use them for ReadyBoost or for moving files around?

And don’t let the ubergeek tell you that all flash drives work at the same speed, either. They don’t. The ubergeek is talking about the speed of the USB 2.0 interface, but you are interested in the speed of the memory, and these are two completely different things. The USB interface supports a theoretical 480 Mb per second, note the small b for bits, which translates to around a theoretical 40MB (MegaBytes) per second. There is no way on this planet that a $2 reject-shop 4GB flash drive is going to give you even a healthy fraction of the throughput that the interface will actually support.

These cautions make it all the more important that you take kadaitcha.cx’s big tip when buying a flash drive to use with ReadyBoost; “If you are purchasing a flash drive from a reputable store then insist that the sales representative agrees to let you return the drive if it turns out the drive cannot be used by ReadyBoost. If the store declines, take your business elsewhere…”

ReadyBoost

Windows 7 includes a feature called ReadyBoost, which is a cache that can be stored on high speed USB flash drives to increase Windows’ performance. Not all ‘Hi-Speed” USB flash drives are fast enough for Windows 7 though; Windows 7′s minimum specification for ReadyBoost-capable high-speed flash is 2.5 MB per second on 4KB random reads, and 1.75 MB per second on 512 KB random writes. That’s megabytes per second, not megabits.

Windows 7 supports up to 8 ReadyBoost drives, with an upper limit of 256GB in total. If kadaitcha.cx were into using words like “cool” to refer to a technology (shudder) then this technology would be worthy of the label.

ReadyBoost works in conjunction with another technology called SuperFetch. SuperFetch learns what you use your computer for at various times of the day, for example email and browsing the web for news in the morning, followed by some accounting and word processing in the evening. SuperFetch will load up the ReadyBoost cache at different times of the day with different application components in expectation of your habits so that your applications start up with as much speed as possible.

To get the best out of ReadyBoost, get a flash or pen drive that is about three times the size of your installed RAM. You can also use multiple flash drives, kadaitcha.cx uses six 4GB flash drives, all dedicated to ReadyBoost. Yes, six of them. At 4GB each.

There is no point using ReadyBoost if you run from a Solid State Hard Disk Drive (SSD). ReadyBoost is disabled if Windows 7 detects an SSD.

Important Note

Flash drives generally come formatted as FAT32, which has a maximum file size of 4GB. If you buy a larger flash drive to dedicate to ReadyBoost you will not be able to use any more than 4GB if the flash drive is formatted FAT32 because FAT32 will only allow files up to 4GB in size and no more . You must format the drive either as NTFS or exFAT in order to use more than 4GB of any higher-capacity flash drive.

Misleading Advertising?

Most packaged flash drives have text emblazoned on them that says something along the lines of “2GB Hi-Speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive”, but the packaging is utterly silent on the flash drive’s actual access times. If the flash memory itself is not explicitly included in statements about high speed then the statements should be assumed to relate only to the speed of the USB interface and not to the access speed of the flash memory.

At the end of the day, any USB device, even a slow one, is “Hi-Speed” when compared to a floppy disk, and any USB device is considered by manufacturers to be “Hi-Speed” if its interface works at USB 2.0 speeds, but that does not mean the flash memory of a USB pen drive is anything approaching high-speed.

Lexar: A Case in Point

In amongst past advertising blurbs for the Lexar Firefly were superlative marketing phrases like “Ultra-Small Storage with Huge Personality”, “More Than Just Good Looks”, “Serious Power”, “Great Features” and “Pick One to Meet Your Needs”, was the statement, “Behind those cool colors lies the heart of all your information. The powerful, hi-speed USB JumpDrive FireFly…”

Lexar’s later advertising used superlative phrases like “Cool design and flashy colors”, “Ultra small, ultra portable”, “Massive storage capacities” and “High-performance USB flash drive”. The advertising even included an in-your-face graphic that explicitly states, “Works with Windows Vista”.

The Lexar JumpDrive FireFly is not “hi-speed” enough for Windows Vista, let alone Windows 7. In fact, the Lexar JumpDrive FireFly’s access speed is slower than a week of rainy Sundays. kadaitcha.cx knows this because kadaitcha.cx got stuck with two of these rubbish things. It was that act of being stuck by Lexar’s packaging that led to this article.

When a “hi-speed” pen drive like the Lexar Firefly takes almost two minutes to copy 150MB, it is not “hi-speed”. A much older Lexar JumpDrive, a different model to the FireFly, did the very same copy of 150MB in under 25 seconds.

An older flash drive can have performance characteristics that are acceptable to Windows ReadyBoost; the newer and higher-capacity Lexar FireFly does not have what it takes, despite the packaging; Windows 7 will not use the Firefly as a ReadyBoost cache because the Firefly is not up to standard. This problem could not have been known about by reading any material available from the manufacturer. Indeed one could be forgiven for thinking that “Works with Windows Vista” might have meant the drive was ReadyBoost compatible on Vista, but it meant no such thing. The phrase “Works with Windows Vista” meant exactly that; the drive works under that OS, as a drive, not as a ReadyBoost cache.

Lexar were kind enough to furnish proof that the above is true; they provide a JumpDrive comparison chart where all is revealed. The flash drives that are good enough for ReadyBoost all state “Enhanced for Windows ReadyBoost”; no such claim is made for the FireFly, though Lexar do claim that the drive is “Windows Vista compatible”, which isn’t the same as ReadyBoost compatible.

If you’re wondering about the references to Vista in a Windows 7 article it’s because Lexar have not updated their blurbs for Windows 7.

In short, if the packaging for the pen drive does not explicitly state that the drive is ReadyBoost compatible then you should assume it is not ReadyBoost compatible at all. You should apply that rule even if the package says “Works with Windows Vista” or even “Works with Windows 7″.

So, is it misleading advertising? Technically, no. Marketing spin-doctors are relying on the assumption that 99% of the population are too stupid to work out the real meaning of the words used in their blurbs.

Compatibility List and Additional Warnings

The Warnings

Further down the page you will be given a link to Grant Gibson’s website, which has a comprehensive list of pen drives that are, according to users who have tested them, compatible with ReadyBoost, however there are some things you should know before you take the user comments at face value and get stuck with a lemon.

• When reading the ReadyBoost Compatibility List, avoid any entries with user comments that say things like, “at least I think it works”, or “I believe this should work”, or “I had to test it a few times but I think it eventually worked.”

These are highly suspicious statements and may have been made by someone who doesn’t have the brains to work out if their tests worked or not, or they may have been made by some starry-eyed teenager making their first post on a web board, over-awed by the experience of seeing their name in lights for the first time.

• The website lists the very Lexar Firefly pen drive, which kadaitcha.cx rags on this page, as working with ReadyBoost.

This happens because electronics manufacturers use a sorting process called ‘product binning’, which is applied to everything from resistors through to memory chips and even your computer’s CPU. When a product comes off the manufacturing line it is tested and routed to a ‘bin’ based on its performance characteristics. You can have two identical units come off the line, one immediately after the other, and one can end up in the top-end bin and the other in the ‘rubbish’ bin.

The components that go into the low-end bins are put into low-specification equipment. This greatly reduces waste and is a good approach to sorting electronic components provided the finished article lives up to its specification.

Product binning can result in your purchasing a pen drive that is not advertised as ReadyBoost compatible but, lo and behold, when you try it, Windows finds the drive is barely within specification and will use it as a ReadyBoost cache. Product binning explains why some people report non-ReadyBoost capable drives as actually working with ReadyBoost.

This is an important point. In order to avoid being ripped off, you must not only consider the comments of the users on Grant’s page, you must consider what kadaitcha.cx has told you about manufacturer’s blurbs; if the packaging does not clearly and explicitly state that the drive can be used for ReadyBoost then do not buy it.

• If you are purchasing a pen drive from a reputable store then insist that the sales representative agrees to let you return the drive if it turns out the drive cannot be used by ReadyBoost. If the store declines, take your business elsewhere, tell the sales representative that you’ll be telling all your friends and colleagues. Maybe the rep will think twice before unfairly screwing a customer again.

The Website

If you’re in the market for a pen or flash drive, visit the ReadyBoost Compatibility List, look for your brand and model before you buy it, and learn from the experience of others who got ripped off.

Caution – U3 Flash Drives

Older-style flash drives that support U3 cannot be used as bootable devices while U3 is installed because U3 does not follow the standards for USB storage devices.

The U3 security software sits inside a pseudo-CD-ROM drive within the flash drive. When you boot with U3 installed, the pseudo-CD-ROM is loaded first, and the data partition on the drive is only enabled after you have authenticated. The presence of the pseudo-CD-ROM will cause your operating system to become horribly confused and it will not boot. kadaitcha.cx is not aware of a method to boot from a U3-enabled device without first eradicating U3.

http://www.sandisk.com/Assets/u3/launchpadremoval.exe

If you want to boot from a U3-enabled device, you will have to try the tools linked to above to eliminate U3, then find some other way of protecting your data. The Open Source TrueCrypt is highly recommended if you need data security.

Note: Reports indicate that the above tool is not always 100% successful in dealing with U3. If you still can’t get rid of U3, try Google.

The good news is u3 is no longer around. The bad news is Microsoft and SanDisk entered into an agreement to create alternative to U3 called StartKey. Fortunately it hasn’t been seen in the wild yet.

The U3 technology suffered a number of issues including locking up your machine, crashing cd/dvd burning software, creating multiple drive letters causing all sorts of confusion, software not being able to read things like photos from a U3 drive, and so on. The problems are due, in the main, to U3 being a complete kludge to get Windows to boot from a pen drive.

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