Ready Boost is an operating system feature included with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. It works by using flash memory, USB 2.0 drive, SD card, CompactFlash or any kind of portable massive flash storage as a drive for disk cache.
Ready Boost is also used to facilitate SuperFetch, an updated version of Windows XP's prefetcher which performs analysis of boot-time disk usage patterns and creates a cache which is used in subsequent system boots
Using Ready Boost-capable flash memory (NAND memory devices) for caching allows Windows Vista to service random disk reads with performance that is typically 80-100 times faster than random reads from traditional hard drives. This caching is applied to all disk content, not just the page file or system DLLs. Flash devices are typically slower than the hard drive for sequential I/O, so to maximize performance, Ready Boost includes logic to recognize large, sequential read requests and then allows these requests to be serviced by the hard drive.
When a compatible device is plugged in, the Windows AutoPlay dialog offers an additional option to use the flash drive to speed up the system; an additional "Ready Boost" tab is added to the drive's properties dialog where the amount of space to be used can be configured. 250 MB to 4 GB of flash memory can be assigned. Ready Boost encrypts, with AES-128, and compresses all data that is placed on the flash device; Microsoft has stated that a 2:1 compression ratio is typical, so that a 4 GB cache could contain upwards of 8 GB of data.
According to Jim Allchin, for future releases of Windows, Ready Boost will be able to use spare RAM on other networked Windows Vista PCs.
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