Enable ReadyBoost on a second internal HDD?

I have two SATA HDDs in my desktop PC (one for daily activity, one for storage and backup). I can finely use ReadyBoost with pendrives, but I wonder, Is there a way I could use my underutilized second HDD to participate in the cacheing mechanism (same concept as having two CPU cores crunch things in parallel: have two HDDs fetch data in parallel)? Clearly speaking: I want to enable ReadyBoost on my separate D: drive.

Solution 1:

ReadyBoost is designed to take advantage of the almost non-existant latency of most flash drives to get small amounts of data into memory quickly. A modern hard drive will still easily out transfer most usb flash drives (50-100MB/s vs. 10-20MB/s) after just a few hundred milliseconds on average.

There really isn't a good way to enable your suggested scenario, or a performance reason to consider it. You would be better off using your second hard drive in a RAID1 configuration (some controllers support parallel reading), or possibly offloading programs/data that won't have to contend for I/O with the boot drive. You would be amazed at the near constant amount of small I/O that happens on the boot drive.

Solution 2:

im almost certain that a hdd is much to slow to be used with ready boost for any real gain

edit: after reading you post again it seems like you are referring to load balancing across the disks (RAID). RAID 0 distributes (stripes) data across 2 disk to improve performance. But if one fails everything is lost. RAID5 does this plus protects against the loss of data given 1 disk failure

Solution 3:

I think that the memory card reader interface is not as fast as the SATA interface. I thought that the USB2.0 data transfer rate is 400mbps where as the SATA3 transfer rate is 600mbps. In burst, i get transfer rates up to 68mb per second SATA to SATA where as I get only 20mb per second tops from the memory card.

If you are trying to impliment ready boost, make sure you are using a USB3.0 interface card reader (must be USB3.0 on both motherboard and card reader) AND your memory card must be a high speed one too.

Solution 4:

Some misconceptions to clarify:

• 3rd Gen SATA is 6000Mbps.
• Yes, most HDDs out-transfer USB2.0, however, only in sequential r/w. the kind of perfomance ReadyBoost was developed for is based on random r/w, which all flash drives easily trounce magnetic drives. This is a function of random access time.
• You can't enable ReadyBoost on an internal hard drive, because it's a hard drive. There's no benefit. If the extra hard drive happens to be faster than your system hard drive, you should just install Windows on the faster drive.
• Otherwise just instruct Windows to create a large page file on that drive.