For a really long time, I felt like all I ever did was bash Microsoft. Not so much because I’m mean, but because I really didn’t see them doing anything terribly creative. I was somewhat impressed with Vista, mostly because it’s a ‘fresh’ attempt at Windows, one without all the suck. It seems like they got a lot of things right this way. But still, it was just an extension of existing technology, even if it was optimized under the hood.<\/p>\n
I just plugged in a solid-state USB drive (a 2GB CF card from my camera), and Windows popped up with its usually little dialog asking if I wanted to import the pictures or AutoPlay or whatever it usually asks. But I noticed there was an additional option, to use it as a ReadyBoost drive.<\/p>\n
I did some reading up on it<\/a>, and it essentially uses solid-state media, which has super-fast seek times, as a ‘swap partition’ (or whatever Windows calls it). When you run out of RAM, your computer will normally “swap out” (hence the name ‘swap file’ in Linux circles) the least-recently-used stuff from memory to your hard drive to free up some room for newer stuff. But hard disks are slow, especially compared to RAM, so this results in a major<\/em> performance hit. (And eventually, you’ll have to read it back in, which slows things down again!) So Windows allows you to offload much of that to solid-state storage, which makes the moving of data much quicker.<\/p>\n This, in and of itself, isn’t entirely a ground-breaking idea. It’s just generally accepted that you want your swap partition in Linux on your fastest drive, and it’s not entirely unheard of to do stuff like have a big ol’ IDE disk, but use a 9GB, 15K RPM SCSI disk (or similar) for swap and the boot partition, to speed things up. Doing it on solid-state media has surely been done before Windows implemented this feature.<\/p>\n But I remain impressed, for a number of reasons:<\/p>\n For a really long time, I felt like all I ever did was bash Microsoft. Not so much because I’m mean, but because I really didn’t see them doing anything terribly creative. I was somewhat impressed with Vista, mostly because … Continue reading \n