Several once-handy features in Windows have been rendered obsolete thanks to hardware advancements. One of these is ReadyBoost—if you’re still trying to use it in 2025, you might be doing more harm than good.
Storage and Memory Have Gotten Much Faster
In case you’re not familiar, ReadyBoost is a Windows feature first included in Vista. It allows you to use a flash drive or SD card as a cache, effectively acting as pretend additional RAM for your system. Because USB flash storage is faster than old spinning hard drives, ReadyBoost was a way to increase performance on old computers that didn’t have much RAM.
The biggest reasons why ReadyBoost is obsolete, and has been for a while now, are SSDs and increasingly faster system memory. ReadyBoost relied on USB speeds to provide cached memory from flash drives. This technique might work when using a slow, mechanical HDD. But with SSDs being included in every modern PC out of the box, an extra cache is not needed anymore.
In fact, if you’ve got an SSD installed in your system, Windows won’t show you the ReadyBoost option at all. When ReadyBoost was first introduced in Windows Vista, SSDs were luxury components only available in high-end products. Now, SSDs have become commonplace and the USB flash memory ReadyBoost uses is simply not fast enough to keep up.
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RAM has also gotten blazing fast. For example, my HP Omen Transcend 14 has 7462 MT/s LPDDR5X memory. That’s faster than the WD M.2 SSD my laptop has, and significantly faster than any USB drive you’ll find lying around in your drawers. With newer laptops transitioning to LPCAMM2 memory, this trend will only continue.
Modern systems also come with plenty of RAM; you’ll find at least 8GB of memory in pretty much any computer. ReadyBoost was specifically designed for systems with limited RAM, but when provided enough memory, Windows features like SuperFetch automatically cache frequently used files. As memory gets faster and cheaper, the low-RAM scenarios ReadyBoost was designed for disappear.
The Performance Boost Is Negligible, if Not Worse
Say you manage to set up and run ReadyBoost on your system anyway. Assuming your system has an HDD and low RAM, you might be able to get a performance boost. However, compared to the overall benefits you’ll get from upgrading to an SSD or more memory, this performance increase will be negligible.
I’ve used ReadyBoost on several occasions. Once was to speed up my old Netbook, and later I tried to see if I could breathe life back into an old computer I couldn’t find the parts for. A cheap $10 SATA SSD upgrade on both devices significantly improved performance and system responsiveness, while ReadyBoost was barely able to keep up.
In any case, when used with modern hardware, ReadyBoost will come with a significant performance hit. Unless you have a decade-old computer lying around that you don’t want to spend any money on, ReadyBoost isn’t going to do much. In its best-case scenario, ReadyBoost can keep an older machine from crashing due to low memory, but that’s about it.
Using ReadyBoost Can Harm Your Flash Drives
Finally, using ReadyBoost can harm the very drives that enable it. When you use a USB drive for ReadyBoost, it goes through continuous write operations as Windows updates the cache. Since flash storage only has a limited number of read/write cycles, you’ll be accelerating the wear on your drive.
Flash storage is not meant to be treated like system RAM, and continued use of the feature can destroy a flash drive in a matter of months. Microsoft suggests that ReadyBoost-enabled devices can last up to 10 years or more, but with finite read/write cycles, I don’t see how that claim holds up.
Regardless, Microsoft has been phasing this feature out in newer Windows versions. Modern versions of Windows 11 have removed the feature entirely. While the company hasn’t officially confirmed whether ReadyBoost will bite the dust, the writing’s on the wall.
ReadyBoost was exciting when Windows Vista came out, especially for PC owners with lower-tier hardware. However, in the world of blazing-fast SSDs and system memory, it’s antiquated.
