Readyboost in Vista (usb/SC Card) improves lightroom performance?

I have a HP dv4 laptop with:

-Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz P7350
-4GB PC2-6400 (400Mhz) Ram
-1064 Mhz Front Side Bus
-320 GB hard drive
-Vista x64 with Lightroom 2

I run lightroom fairly fine, but sometimes it slows down with large galleries and takes a while to load on picture change. This is not unreasonable however.
I have my SD card slot not doing anything most of the time, so I was wondering if I stick a 4GB SD card in there and turn it into a dedicated Readyboost, will it improve my lightroom performance?

My computer is pretty heavily used, since I have a XB3000 docking station with:
-Second 15" monitor
-2 external 1.5TB hard drives, with Second Copy running to backup my "user documents" from my laptop to HD1 every 3 days, and make a shadow copy of HD1 to HD2 every 7 days.
-Wireless external mouse and keyboard

I try to offload my non-current RAW files to HD1 for archiving, which is backed up to HD2 every 76 days or whenever I need.

Would I see a performance increase using Readyboost with vista?

I can either use a micro-SD->SD with adapter, which is almost permanently in the laptop or a 4GB flash drive plugged into the docking station, which would only work when I have my computer on the docking station (90% of the time when I am home). Which do you think would be a better option?

From what I've heard, your mileage will vary. You already have 4GB which is pretty good - so short answer, try it if you already have a card handy, but don't expect much. For me, it actually slowed me down a little in somethings and had no effect on everything else. I was using an 8GB 300X UDMA card I believe.

I have a Q6600 quad core with 4GB of ram and Vista 32bit, running LR 2 I notice a difference with a 1GB USB stick working in readyboost.

It doesn't effect processing times, but it does help with module switching, file viewing, application switching etc.

However, if your really after a performance boost then if your mother board will handle it, look at replacing the CPU with a Core 2 Quad, as they are stupidly cheap at the moment.

I have a laptop. Not much modifications possible. I will test out this ready boost though and see how it works.

Readyboost uses the SD/USB drive as RAM, which means its gotta be fast. My friend invested a fast Sandisk SD card to put into his IBM at all times to use for readyboost, and when I had my dell laptop, and it was docked and I would stick a 16 gb Sandisk Contour flash drive and it would run pretty quickly.

Then I got an SSD (crucial), which changed everything, it was such a great upgrade (330 bucks USD) and at that point I didn't even need readyboost (actually windows said your internal drive was so fast, that readyboost won't help at all). Only con was that the $330 SSD was 128 GB. I recently bought a 256 Corsair SSD for my MacBook Pro and that has been running well too

So, in the end, either get a fast (at least 4 GBs) SD card or get an SSD (or a fast flash drive)

EiTheL wrote in post #9654197
Readyboost uses the SD/USB drive as RAM, which means its gotta be fast. My friend invested a fast Sandisk SD card to put into his IBM at all times to use for readyboost, and when I had my dell laptop, and it was docked and I would stick a 16 gb Sandisk Contour flash drive and it would run pretty quickly.

Wrong, Readyboost uses flash based device as page file, not ram. And the read/write only needs to be a few MB/s to already be much, much faster than a HDD. Readyboost takes advantage of the random access nature of flash to copy SMALL files from memory to page, the same type of files that will turn your hdd to mush (if your hdd reads 4mb files at 100mb/s, it may read a 16kb file at only 100kb/s, so if your usb stick reads/writes at 3.5mb/s, that's already 35x faster). Now, an SSD already works like a flash based device (because that's what it is), so it doesn't have that big of an issue dealing with small file sizes. That means readyboost isn't needed at all really.

My bad, by RAM I meant Page, which is why with an SSD you don't need readyboost.

basroil wrote in post #9654255
Wrong, Readyboost uses flash based device as page file, not ram.

I know this is a bit of pot, kettle, but maybe you could try being a little more diplomatic

a little to direct, I agree. But that is him I guess.

tim wrote in post #9661357
I know this is a bit of pot, kettle, but maybe you could try being a little more diplomatic

I would if people learned to click edit and change their stuff when told nicely
Too bad it doesn't happen ever. I'm sure he knows I mean no harm.

My computer was struggling with my 5D2 files despite having a 8GB SD card for readyboost. I stick a 2GB flash drive in there and it runs okay. I am thinking of picking up 8GB flash drive to use for readyboost as well.

Anyone else have any positive results with ready boost?

Readyboost is just a disk cache, AFAIK. You'd probably be better off with more RAM, but if you don't have much memory it can help a bit.

What I heard was that readyboost was used as a supplement to the cache memory that a harddrive would use. Which would kinda mean that files would be saved faster...

Yes Readyboost is just poor man's RAM, it won't speed up write speeds to the HDD though, the files would save marginally faster.

Replace your hard drive with a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT. As a hard drive it'll probably be faster than your old 320GB drive and it has the bonus of a 4GB SSD built-in. That's used to cache frequently-accessed data in the same way as ReadyBoost does.