Seeing the problems in compatibility people have been having with their various USB memory sticks / thumb drives, I was keen to see if the sticks I had lying around would work.
My trusty Kingston DataTraveler U3 1G failed immediately and the ReadyBoost application log showed it had a pitiful random read speed of less than 500 KB/secs.
I noticed that the default allocation unit size was 4096 bytes, so I reformatted in FAT32 with 512 bytes, retested and received a rather splendid 5129 KB/sec random read speed.
I initially tried to up the ReadyBoost cache size from the suggested 870MB to the full capacity of the stick, but this failed totally and ReadyBoost wouldn't start. I deleted the cache file and recreated one, at the recommended size, and it has run like that ever since.
I've done a similar trick on other machines I've played with and half of the sticks I've tried, that initially don't show the performance necessary to run ReadyBoost will run if reformatted in the smallest allocation unit size they support. Give it a go!
I've not noticed any performance differences however, unless swapping between really memory intensive applications, it didn't improve performance in situations like 5-6 Office 2007 apps running.
If you are looking for the ReadyBoost logs, to see the performance of your own sticks, it's buried in Computer Management > Event Viewer > Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > ReadyBoost > Operational.
