Readyboost feature in Linux

use your pendrive as swap to emulate Windows ReadyBoost feature ?


windows has a nice feature called Ready Boost that allows your pendrive to be used as temporary swap space to boost the performance of your computer.sice the pen drives have lower access times than hard disks , using your pen drive as swap can boost your performance.for this you will need to use a Ready-boost capable pen drive, ready boost capable pen drives works best.



1) dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/disk/extraswap bs=1M count=1024

2) mkswap /media/disk/extraswap

3) swapon -p 32767 /media/disk/extraswap

4) to turn the pendrive swap off , swapoff /media/disk/extraswap


Pros:-

1) The seek time on a small flash drive is much faster than a HDD.


Cons:-


1) it's a false economy. Any performance boost you get will be poor. You'd get much better value out of actual RAM.

2)Readyboost would be quicker than a hard drive for swap but agreed it can kill off a flash drive (they only have so many read/write cycles) and it's really just a band-aid.



Raistlin355:-

Since I heard about the "Vista Readyboost" I immediately thought of the swap file in Linux and the pagefile in Windows (same thing just different names) and I wondered "What would be the use for this?!?" and then it hit me. Vista wants like 2gb of memory to run smoothly and M$ knew this but they wanted people to upgrade their OS so they came out with readyboost so people with old machines didn't have to buy ram and go through the *hassle* of installing it, they could just plug in a usbn drive and viola!! no more swapping. Now having used this on a Vista box with 512MB of memory, readyboost is the worst, the performance you get is crappy (as usb xfer rate is slower than RAM) and it wore out my usb drive in 2 days. Someone said earlier itt "Typical M$ gimmick" that is true, it is no more than a gimmick to get people who don't know any better to buy their crappy os.


see:-
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=395435
http://apcmag.com/readyboost_for_linux.htm