Investigating Intel's Turbo Memory: Does it really work?

Problem 3: Keeping that drive spun down

The final issue we had to address before we could even begin to look at how Turbo Memory impacted battery life was how to test the platform.  Turbo Memory requires Windows Vista, as it piggybacks on two Vista technologies (ReadyDrive and ReadyBoost) but unfortunately most of our battery life benchmarks don't work under the OS. 

We instead turned to some of our usual performance tests and with a few modifications, turned them into battery life measurements.  By looping SYSMark 2007, WorldBench 6 and various other tests we were able to create meaningful test scenarios that ran the battery down in a repeatable manner, where Turbo Memory had a chance to work. 

When testing Turbo Memory, Intel recommends reducing the HDD spin down timer to its minimum allowable setting, which is 1 minute under Vista.  We opted for a more reasonable setting of 3 minutes, but also looked at results with the timer set to 1 minute to see if it impacted battery life at all.  We found that the difference in battery life with Turbo Memory enabled between the timer set to 3 minutes vs. 1 minute was negligible at best, a couple of minutes was the largest difference we saw in our tests.