Ever since I packed away my old Amiga A1200 I’ve been a Windows user.  Starting from Windows 3.0 I’ve been through virtually all the evolutions — 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, NT, 95, 98, ME (eek!), 2000, XP and Vista.  I’ve always favoured the universal nature of windows, with a tool for every conceivable task, over the supposed simplicity of MacOS or the geek appeal of Linux.

At work there are a lot of windows haters.  Someone always has an opinion on how a particular task would have been easier on a Mac or under Linux.   So a couple of weekends ago curiosity got the better of me and I decided to install a couple of alternative OSes. 

First up was the easy one, Ubuntu Hardy Heron.  For a bit of extra interest I decided to run it in a virtual machine under VMWare.  After all, I guess there’s not much point in having a Quad Core CPU if you’re not going to properly multi-task.  Installation was dead simple: Install VMWare Player, browse to the Virtual Appliance marketplaceand download the Hardy Heron image.  All in, it took 30 mins max, including the download time.

Next was the slightly trickier Mac OSX Leopard.  I wanted to run it natively for best performance, so that required a bit of disk partitioning and boot menu installers.  The hardware setup on my Dell desktop made it tricky.  It’s running a RAID disk array which requires software support.  I’ve got an external USB drive that would’ve done the trick, but I didn’t fancy disabling the SATA RAID array just to make this happen.   So instead, I decided to install it on my Acer Laptop — it’s still a decent spec (Core2, 2GB) which is perfectly good for OSX.  I won’t go into the detail of the install here, but it’s enough to say the online tutorials generally seem to work.  After a couple of hours of fiddling we were up and running.

Here’s the final setup:

(Laptop running OSX Leopard, Desktop running Vista over dual monitors with Ubuntu virtual machine on the left screen)

Ok, so I’ve just bought a nice new Dell Quad Core machine.  It’s fast, it looks good, and it’s dead quiet.  Or at least it’s quiet until you ask it to do anything. (more…)

I recently received an email from John Marshall pointing out that everyone was reporting sequential write performance on my ReadyBoost compatibility chart, whilst the official requirements were for random write performance.

I couldn’t get to the bottom of it on the web, so I emailed Matt Ayers at Microsoft, the Program Manager who’s in charge of the ReadyBoost feature.  He explained that early beta versions of Vista measured sequential writes, but that the release version measures random writes.  Everything has been updated in the release version apart from the EventLog entry. 

Matt has filed a bug, so expect that to be fixed in future updates.  Thanks for pointing that out John!

Anyone who’s tried to use the ReadyBoost chart recently will be pleased to know that I’ve given the page a bit of a speed boost.  When I first put up the page it listed the compatibility of about 32 Flash drives.  That list now runs to 880 devices and increases daily, making the HTML page 500Kb — quite a lot to serve over my home cable line!

I’ve now split up the chart so it shows 20 results per page.  There are options to jump to specific makes, and so far no make runs to more than 7 pages, so hopefully that’s an ok compromise for everyone.

Please let me know if you spot any problems!

Just a quick post to clear up any confusion on the ReadyBoost compatibility list.  It turns out that devices which don’t quite meet the Vista storage spec may still show up as ‘compatible’ in Windows Vista (and in this list). 

Dave Pryce emailed to point out that the minimum spec for ReadyBoost is 2.5MB/s read & 1.75 MB/s write, while Microsoft’s ReadyBoost usage guidelines say that for a device to be listed as Enhanced for ReadyBoost it must do around double that - 5MB/s read & 3MB/s write (based on 4k random reads and 512k random writes).

You probably already know that not all Flash devices are created equal, but it’s interesting to also note that devices that don’t quite meet the spec are still deemed compatible in Vista. My recommendation is to look for read/write rates wherever they’re quoted in the ReadyBoost chart - a faster device should result in a more noticeable performance gain.

The ReadyBoost device list is still growing - 364 devices tested so far, 59% of which have worked with Vista ReadyBoost.

Kingston have fared better than average with two thirds of tested devices working successfully.  My own DataTraveler Elite has been running a ReadyBoost cache flawlessly for several months now.

A few days ago I received an email from Ron Bartle who pointed out the inconsistency in reports for the DataTraveler range.  Some users had success with the DataTraveler 1 and U3 devices whilst others had received failure notices for the same drives, even those with identical capacities. 

I contacted Kingston to see if they could shed any light on why that might be.  Their reply doesn’t answer that question directly, but points out that there’s only one Kingston device that is officially ReadyBoost compatible: 

So far there is only one Kingston DataTraveler which is officially compatible with Readyboost which is our DTS.

The reply went on to say that more new ReadyBoost compatible devices are on the way, and that the rest of their existing product line is still in testing for ReadyBoost compatibility. 

So for now it seems the safe option is to go for the DTS.  If you’re feeling brave you could try the DataTraveler Elite - it’s not officially compatible, but it’s the one I’m using as I write this and it’s had no negative reports so far… and it’s around 30% cheaper than the DTS.