Something that’s been annoying me the last week or so is all the complete misinformation on ReadyBoost+SuperFetch there is on the web. Some of it coming from Microsoft’s own website — they try to explain what it does in dumbed down layman’s terms that just adds to the confusion.
READYBOOST HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH HOW MUCH MEMORY YOU HAVE IN YOUR COMPUTER. There. I said it. Well, it uses RAM, just as any piece of software uses RAM, but it, and it’s big brother SuperFetch, will not “add RAM” in any sense to your computer.
What do they do? They make your old mechanical hard drives seem faster, less laggy, by using solid-state USB memory as a cache of the often used files on your mechanical hard drive. This is precisely what so called “hybrid” drives such as the Seagate Momentus do, except it’s using an internal 4GB solid-state drive instead of a USB memory stick. Note: A modern SSD is typically faster than any memory used in solid-state USB devices, but it is the same over-all idea.
So, if you have a slow mechanical hard drive and buy a fast USB memory stick for use as a ReadyBoost device, you may notice (after you have used your computer a while and Windows has had time to figure out what files you use most and copy them to the ReadyBoost drive) that your computer boots faster, apps start faster, and there is less lag while playing games (especially big games like MMOs).
If on the other hand you have a fairly fast modern mechanical hard drive or your USB memory is just average speed, the boost, if any at all, will most likely be below human perception.
If you have an SSD (solid-state drive) as your boot drive, then ReadyBoost is of no use to you at all, as the SSD will be far faster than your USB Memory stick or most any mechanical hard drive you probably own.
Got it? Good.
And as for superfetch? It also attempts to make accessing files on your mechanical hard drive seem faster by preemptively loading ones you often use into any free RAM you might have. It also tries to keep any files or applications you have used in this free RAM cache. That is, if there are a couple applications you use a lot on your machine, superfetch will try to load them into a special cache in your free memory ASAP and keep them there as long as your machine is on. You can exit and restart these applications often and not worry too much about how slow they will be to start up when you click on them again, because they will be copied directly from your fast memory cache, not from the slow hard drive.
Thus if you have a slow hard drive and a lot of extra RAM, superfetch should help you refrain from throwing things against wall because your apps take forever to load.
So, to recap:
1) Slow hard drive and lots of RAM? SuperFetch is your friend.
2) Slow hard drive and a fast USB memory stick? ReadyBoost is your friend.
3) You have a Solid-State Hard Drive (SSD)? Why then the SSD is your friend. And your helpful pals ReadyBoost and SuperFetch will just sit in the corner in sulk because they have nothing to do.
