Virtual RAM and readyboost - Enhancing your computer's RAM with a USB drive

If you have a lower-end PC, especially a laptop it can come in handy. I had a laptop with 8 gigs of ram, and it was slower than you could imagine. The USB ram boost improved the speed at which applications open and Windows itself booted. By a SMALL margin.

IF you are running the lowest quality of DDR 3 ram which I have never personally even seen 800 MHz the speed will be nearly the same and you may see a boost. However, even the next step up 1066 MHz is nearly a third faster than the USB can handle, making the USB a bottleneck. Even worse if you are using the standard 1333 MHz ram. The only speed I have ever seen sold in a consumer-use PC, the speed is nearly double the transfer rate making the USB completely useless as the bottleneck would be so large it would actually slow your computer down if you are using it. I have tested this myself.

The faster the ram, the bigger the gap in what the USB can offer, the bigger the bottleneck.

You are better off finding out what the model number of your motherboard is, finding out what the max ram it can handle is, and shoving it in there. Be mindful that not all brands of RAM are supported by all motherboards. DDR 3 is cheap right now if you are running that. Samsung is a great brand for compatibility in my limited experience.

I am a redneck nerd that works on computers for fun, not a professional. I am also poor lol I have had to build, rebuild, and cobble PCs together many times and test for myself what works and doesn't.

There is always some gadget or tool that says it will make your pc faster. New ones come out all the time but for the most part they are just rehashed versions of old ideas.

It helps to know what "faster" you are looking for. Faster boot-up and shut down? Better frame rate? Ops per second?

Very few people are on cutting edge technology. Most are 3 or 4 tiers behind. With that in mind, ditch sata and hybrid and go for SSD drives with NVMe support. Its a big step up for many pc's. More and faster ram never hurts. More CPU cores and threads never hurt. I'm using a Ryzen cpu, 64 gig ram, 8 gig gddr6, ssd's w/nvme support and I could still take a few upgrades. Find out the max for your system and aim for that first.

My advice is don't try to build a cutting edge pc. Its like paying twice as much so you can sniff new car smell for a couple weeks until it fades and all you have left is a big payment each month. Figure out what you need it to do best and focus on that.

originally posted by: Untun
a reply to: Gothmog

What seems to be the problem?

It's a desktop.

Didn't mean there was an actual problem with that , it is better to have a multi(hyper) threaded CPU .
3.30 at boost speed is fair .
Try the ReadyBoost . , the worst thing it could do is show no improvement.
Make sure the hard drive has enough space and a good size pagefile .
Run Windows Disk Defragmenter or set Windows to do so periodically .

ETA: I have an older laptop running Windows 11 . Came with Windows 7 .Readyboost is what did the trick for that one...on a 32gb USB drive .
This was just a "can it run it ?" type of project for fun as I had found it tucked away in a chest for years .

CAUTION : You have to format the USB drive , meaning your data will be erased . (Better to use the ex-FAT file system when formatting)

a reply to: Untun

If your PC has a solid state drive, or more than 4 gig of RAM, then this won't do anything appreciable and may slow things down.

a reply to: Gothmog

Gothmog is right, one of the easiest and best ways to increase your windows performance is by fine tuning your swap file. The default algorithm used by Microsoft creates an overly large swap file on the hard drive. I generally set the swap file to half the amount of installed RAM (32GB RAM / 16GB swap file size) As noted by chrOnaut, a solid state drive operates much faster than a mechanical drive (even a 15000rpm drive).

Don't use more than 75 percent of you hard drive, after that you will begin to affect performance albeit only a little at the beginning. I also turn off drive indexing when running an ssd.

Ready Boost is limited by the max speed of your USB port, for most people that's USB 3.0. That's a fraction of the speed of an SSD and DDR3 or DDR4 RAM.

The reason why this worked on old systems was that thumb drives load faster than the outdated HDDs. In fact thumb drives actually use RAM memory. Usually the portions that don't pass quality insurance inspections.

These days with SSDs as storage, that readyboost is really a relic of ancient history. (As are old mechanical hard drives. I guess they do have their place. I have an old 5GB HDD I store stuff on and use as a server, you know pictures, movies etc. Wouldn't think of loading a game on it though.

a reply to: SirBobkat
A little secret for you .
If you have 2 drives , split the pagefile between both drives .

I'll add this, though unrelated to the topic... I just bought a $320 mini PC on Amazon Day and it's speed and capability has been astounding for the money.

Beelink Mini PC, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H 8 Core(Up to 4.4GHz), 16GB DDR4 RAM 500GB NVMe M.2 SSD, SER5 Pro Win 11 Mini Desktop Computer Support 4K@60Hz Output/WiFi 6/BT5.2/Dual HDMI/USB-C, Gaming/Office/Home

It's silent and fast. I don't game, but I do use it for a little bit of photo editing. It's also an always on Wireguard server.

As far as the topic...

I don't see how a system with 2gb of memory will have anything better than USB 2.0. And even if say you added a PCI card with USB 3.0/USBC ports, the PCI bus is going to be slow and dated and you still won't see USB 3.0 speeds.

Even buying an $80 RaspberryPi seems better than trying to salvage a old 2gb computer with a USB pagefile clone.