Is it good to use a SD card with Vista’s ReadyBoost? Tech Crater takes a brief look at the pros and cons, then, you can decide.

Advantages

1. More subtle - a SD card fits almost completely into an internal card reader, leaving only a few protruding millimetres. Your notebook can continue to look clean and sleek
2. Less accidents - There won’t be a chunky USB thumb drive hanging out the side. This means there is no risk of the USB drive getting caught on something and ripped out. In the worse case scenario, the whole USB port may get ripped out.
3. No seizures - Some epileptic people can’t enjoy Christmas lights. A seizure can also be caused by USB drives with a light that flashes when being used. SD cards don’t have a light so they are 100% safe. *ok ok, so we’ve run out of advantages*

Disadvantages

1. Less compatibility - to use SD flash memory for ReadyBoost, both the SD card and its reader must be fast. The majority of external readers connected by USB do not meet the speed requirements. Internal readers connected by IDE, PCI or PCMCIA appear to be the most compatible.
2. Comparatively slow - generally speaking, SD cards are at least 47% slower than USB thumb drives. The fastest SD card reported for ReadyBoost to date has been Corsair’s 40x 1GB, with a Random Read Speed of around 4.17MB/s. This is nothing compared to Corsair’s TurboFlash 1GB thumb drive, reading at 7.92MB/s.
3. Less stable - the ReadyBoost interface with SD cards is not as refined as that for USB devices. Only certain SD cards are mostly stable. Recently, Microsoft recently released a ‘Secure Digital (SD) hotfix rollup package’ to resolve bugs that would crash Vista when a low voltage SD card was used for ReadyBoost.