October 2009
Intermediate to advanced
1760 pages
93h 25m
English
Windows 7 supports Windows ReadyBoost, originally introduced with Windows Vista. ReadyBoost uses external USB flash drives as a hard disk cache, thus improving disk read performance in some circumstances. Supported external storage types include USB thumb drives as shown in Figure 16-10, SD cards, and CF cards.

Figure 16-10. ReadyBoost uses flash storage to improve disk read performance.
Unlike Windows Vista, Windows 7 recognizes that ReadyBoost will not provide a performance gain when the primary disk is an SSD. Windows 7 disables ReadyBoost when reading from an SSD drive.
External storage must meet the following requirements: