Digital Home Thoughts: ReadyBoost: Helpful or Not?

ReadyBoost is one of those interesting Vista technologies that sounds amazingly cool on paper, but out in the real world it's harder to figure out if it's really helpful or not. This article over at Tom's Hardware Guide is one of the mot authoritative I've read on the subject, and their results show that if you have a system with only 512 MB of RAM, it can benefit significantly from the addition of a 2 GB ReadyBoost flash drive. But if you have 2 GB of RAM in a system, the benefits are much less.

I was benchmarking a new system I'm building (review forthcoming) and using PC Mark 2005, it benchmarked in at a score of 7106. I rant the same test again, only this time with a 2 GB Sandisk USB Flash drive acting in ReadyBoost capacity, and the score jumped up to 7455. That's a 5% jump in performance, and while 5% might not seem like much, PC performance enthusiasts will go to great lengths to squeeze out an extra 5% performance bump. I ran it again and got a score of 7649, which is 8% above the original score. A third run turned up a score of 7541, a 6% boost over the original score - giving us an average performance boost of 6.3%. Not too shabby, especially since USB Flash drives are plentiful.

What's your experience been with ReadyBoost? Have you done any testing and seen performance improvements?