Intel Turbo Memory (Robson) - Anyone had experience of it?

[Dos_Box]

I have an old-ish laptop that is on a 667Mhz bus but has a slot for one of these. If you haven't encountered one you can read all about it here: Intel Turbo Memory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Has anyone here ever used a laptop with one fitted, and did it make a difference? They fit in a dedicated mini-pci slot are dirt cheap to pick up (circa £20) but to speed up an otherwise fine laptop would be nice.

 

 

They stopped using them when laptops moved to faster RAM/bus speeds/SSD's and Microsft introduced ReadyBoost.

[Gurra]

These modules support both MS ReadyBoost memory caching and MS ReadyDrive in MS Vista and 7. The first modules were on PCIe which is faster and consumes less power than USB 2.0. The NAND flash used on them is also much faster than what's on your standard USB memory stick. When used with a standard hard disk there are significant performance gains in system bootup, application load, and system resume times. There is also some power saving which lets you run on battery for longer.

While there are still some small advantages using Robson over using a hybrid hard drive (HDD with NAND flash cache built in), if you have a SSD there is really no point in fitting one of these.

I had a Lenovo T61 for years with a Robson module configured for ReadyBoost use and it never gave any trouble.

- edit - forgot to mention - make sure your laptop BIOS has robson support.

Edited May 2, 2012 by Gurra

[Arthur]

If you are using Windows 7, you may also come across obscure issues like the one described here when using Turbo Memory.

[Dos_Box]

Thanks guys, I will indulge I think The laptop is quite a good spec, but the 667Mhz bus could do with a little assistance, and as it's on a 'normal' hard drive I think rapid boot and wake up from sleep would make all the difference.