Vista ReadyBoost Requirements for Flash Drives Leaked

Those who have been following Vista development for eons probably know the long-delayed OS has a caching technique that borrows the fast random access time of a USB flash drive (or any NAND removable media for that matter) to speed up application and file retrieval. Now, someone has tried this feature, called ReadyBoost, and made a few comments on the instructions on the setup and the requirement for flash drives.

Documented in Tom Archer's blog, in order for ReadyBoost to function properly, you will need at least a 64MB Hi-Speed USB flash drive (which goes without saying) that exceeds 3.5MB/s for 4KB random reads and 2.5MB/s for 512KB random writes uniformly across the device. You will get more benefits from this if the capacity and small file size speeds excel the baseline requirements. Somehow, on another site, we saw 431MB as being the optimal level of capacity one should set for ReadyBoost.

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