Ultra Fly Drive and ReadyBoost

I found a great deal the other day via Woot.com for a 2gig USB 2.0 Flash Drive. I have been looking for such a device ever since upgrading to Windows Vista and hearing about the ReadyBoost feature that Vista introduces. The drive advertised, clearly said that it was optimized for use with the ReadyBoost feature in Vista. So I purchased one and received it today.

After fiddling with the blister package for awhile I finally grabbed some scissors and just cut the packaging all to hell. I got it out and plugged it in. There was some crappy virus scan software already on the drive so I formatted it and then tested its compatibility with ReadyBoost. No go... Windows was telling me that the drive I had was too slow and wouldn't work with ReadyBoost. Upon hearing this I quickly jumped on the net to try and find a solution.

My searches led me to the Ultra website and their forums. There was already a thread started about this very issue but unfortunately no answers had been posted yet. One of the forum administrators was looking into the situation. So I decided to see what I could do to fix the problem on my own and low and behold. After some messing around with settings I did manage to get my drive to work with ReadyBoost. Below is instruction on what to do if your in this situation as well.

Note: this is only confirmed to work on the 2gb Fly Drive model ULT40004.

===

Format the Drive with the following settings in place.

Capacity:
1.92 GB

File System:
NTFS

Allocation Unit Size:
4096

[x] Quick Format

Then go to the the General tab under the drives properties. And put a check by the following.

[x] Compress this drive to save disk space
[x] Index this drive for faster searching

test the device for ReadyBoost. Also make sure that you have the "Optimize for Performance" setting applied in the properties for the device under the Hardware tab.

This method worked for me, hope it works for you as well.

Cheers