"Ok. So how exactly does pre-loading crap to a slower media then my hard drive, or ram actually boost the speed of anything?"

The horrid ~10 ms read latency of a harddrive is very punishing when you're reading hundreds of tiny config files, registry entries, .DLLs, bitmaps and crap. I have no trouble believing you could achieve a modest speed up by mirroring those files on flash memory.

Of course, you could achieve an even greater speed up by globbing related things toghether like games have been doing since forvever.( e.g. .wad(doom), .pak(quake) and .gcf(source engine)).

Just because it's FLASH doesn't mean it's USB. There are PATA and PCIe FLASH cards. See: http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/turbomemory/index.htm
which are supposed to be 2X faster than HDDs with no spin-up latency

I tried ReadyBoost with a 4GB USB stick and I was very impressed. My middling-performance laptop was responding much quicker in some circumstances.

Then I had to wander off to attend to some kid that fell down, and my laptop went to sleep as programmed. Afterwards ReadyBoost didn't work so well. It was all crash-and-burn and took an hour to store itself out.


You'll see that Intel wants to sell you a flash PATA drive that you can install in your machine and "pin" stuff to. This means that they're not talking about USB keys.

They may be aiming for USB 3.0 compatible drives for future systems, but I'd agree based on current products it's useless

What I want to see is something that lets me pre-load it into actual system RAM. Pretty much this exact interface except it goes to RAM not USB flash drives

Sounds like a waste of time to me and I can't see it actually being faster then HDD with the current USB 2.0 Speeds unless this is for USB 3

2 years too late...

Ok. So how exactly does pre-loading crap to a slower media then my hard drive, or ram actually boost the speed of anything? 

Pin this! My rather run of the mill $99 640gb WD Drive has faster read xfer rates then most USB flash drives, further my older RAID0 setup with 2 Seagate 320gb 7200.10's is in the same boat... So somehow prepositioning data off of the faster drives, and onto a relatively slow USB key, is going to give me more performance? I could understand if the the USB keys were faster then my drives, but i'd seriously just rather have more ram, then this garbage. 

Bring out faster flash drives, then we'll talk.

... when it can be used to speed up real world game* performance and I will consider shelling out for the OS of doom until then shan't so ner :p

eg Enemy Taramosalata Quake Snores or Supreme Codpiece: Forged Appliance.

Looks more like a bit of hardware with drivers

I was hoping to have a customisable version of readyboost, doesnt look like this is it though