Ram Drive = Memory as Harddrive

[kelvin1704]

Are we going to see a 100% or 200% performance increase?

 

[Whitedog]

How memory works 101

kelvin1704 ? I don't think either. From what I experienced in the past with RAMDRIVES, it's a slight increase only... but it highly depends on what you're doing with it. The video editing I couldn't tell you, as I've never done any of that...

I want to clarify a few things about this RAM Drive though... Some mention creating a RAMDRIVE and making it your Swap File drive... This is absolutely ludicrous. I'm here to tell you people that the Software Engineers at Microsoft are a Lot smarter than that.

The way Windows is designed, the more RAM you have the less Windows makes use of the pagefile. In fact, if you have enough, you can just disable memory paging all together (in Windows XP).

Everything you load, be it the OS, Programs, files?etc? goes into RAM, when that particular program/file?whatever is closed down, it is cached. MEANING, these particular memory blocks are now available memory, however, the information in them is still stored until it is needed for something else.

For example, open a program up. You see it appear in the processes list and it shows how much memory it is using.
Now close the program down. It disappears from the processes list. However, it is still cached in memory. Open the program back up. Notice it did not have to access your drive this time, rather, it loaded it from the system cache.

Paging occurs when you have more things running than what you have available system memory. Windows then decides what you probably are not using right now and writes it to the hard drive. Believe it or not, it?s actually done Very fast.
However, if you have GigaGobs of memory, it is VERY unlikely that Windows will ever need to write to the pagefile.

Like I said, MS Engineers are NOT bozo?s, They actually know what they were doing when they designed Windows. ?IF? your computer has the memory, it will use it. Windows it not going to write a bunch of crap to the hard drive when you are sitting at 90% physical memory free.

One last point to make? let?s say you do have a 1GB Ram Drive? You just can?t stand loading your programs off the hard drive, so you copy it to the RAM DRIVE to run it from there? well, by the time you did all that, you could have just loaded the program? them it would ALREADY be in memory? Are you getting my point?

You only get 20-40% increase in load times anyway. It?s nothing like 2x to 10x faster as some people say.

OK, I gotta get back to work. Laterzzz..

 

[kelvin1704]

Thanks Whitedog.

An increase of 20 to 40% load time. I would agree with you on that. I am just wondering how it will effect the performance when I am encoding video files.

 

[kgraeme]

I used to do this on my Mac all the time. Creating a ram disk was a simple part of the OS. With a modern OS though, it's much less necessary. As Whitedog mentioned, XP is highly optimized for using memory efficiently. It just doesn't seem worth the trouble.

 

[PH0ENIX]

Whitedog;

Thats what I was about to say.

The paging file is there for when your system is LOW on physical memory - so assigning some of your physical memory to be a swapfile is nothing short of completely counter-productive.

I have 768mb of memory - and as yet my system hasn't ever touched the pagefile - but in saying that I dont do any kind of video editing or CAD work.

The only good swapfile-moving theory i've heard was what I did to my own system - if you've got a RAID array that isn't your boot drive, put the swapfile on that.

Personally i'm in agreement with the general consensus of this thread - just throw as much physical memory into the ah heck as it'll take - and you should be right

my .02

Ph0.

 

[kelvin1704]

PH0ENIX:

then should we disable swap file?

 

[buleyb]

Thats not recommended. The swap file isn't only to make run when you're running out of space, but to remove infrequently accessed items to keep things efficient. If you're editing large files, you can quickly use up physical RAM, where a page file might work fine. Keep it enabled.

If you're looking to speed up swap/page file access times, split the page file to multiple physical hard drives (not logical drives, that doesn't buy you anything). If you're simply looking to eliminate data file access times, RAID 0, 0-1, or 5 would be your best bet (but not cheap).

RAM-drives are great for some things, not an everyday solution to speed though. Your best bet, increase you physical RAM anyway, 256 isn't going to make the cut in and sizeable video editing. Do that first, see how your speed increases (should be pretty good )

 

[kelvin1704]

thanks man...

anyone else has any comment on this?

 

[kelvin1704]

Alright. Can you guys sees my conclution is right or not.

Basically, a RAM drive or disabling the swap file will only benefit when one application is assessing a lot of files simultanenously. For example a library server. Since a lot of user might assess it simultaneiously, by using MEMORY as storage, it can seek the file fast and without any efficiencies problem (latency).

Therefore, since I am focusing on Mpeg encoding and video editing, I would not be benefiting from it much. Might only sees a max of 10% gain in performance.

Correct me if i am wrong

 

[FishTankX]

That's largely correct. A RAM+CPU upgrade would give you a much larger kick.

 

[FishTankX]

I'd suggest adding atleast 512MB more RAM, then upgrading CPU's at a later date.

 

[kelvin1704]

Got it loud and clear.

One more question, should I disable swap file even if i have 2GB?

Currently, during encoding, i just found that it use PEAK at 128MB

 

[kelvin1704]

anyone?

 

[CZroe]

Here are some PCI cards. They can take 1GB DIMMs per slot and the have 8 & 16 slot versions. They also work in tandem, so you could load up all the PCI clots with 16GBs a piece! They have externally powered versions so you can keep just the RAM drive on a UPS when the system is shut down or the power goes out...

 

[kelvin1704]

Should i expect a slightly performance drop since PCI slot should be slower than directly plug your RAM on the Memory Slot

 

[CZroe]

Umm, think of it this way: Writing off a huge portion of your insanely high-speed system memory and giving it all to a RAM drive will have a HUGE hit on system benchmarks, while only improving disk access benchmarks. Getting an SDRAM system just to purchase mass amounts of SDRAM would also seriously impair any modern system's benchmarks. Adding SDRAM to your PCI bus as a virtual hard drive and setting your system's Virtual Memory page file to use it is a way to upgrade your memory capacity while retaining the speed of your super-fast DDR400 or PC1066 RDRAM capacity without hurting system performance. Sounds like a winner.

If the Western Digital Special Edition drives benefit so much from an 8MB cache instead of 2MB, imagine a hard drive made of GIGABYTES of cache with no disks at all. Put it on the same PCI bus as a normal HDD controller and you're sure to notice the difference, even though PCI and ATA133 are both limited to 133MBps (RAMdrives would be SUSTAINED, not burst 133MBps, & nearly no seek time! Woohoo!).

 

[kelvin1704]

Ok, just when to the site and they said 110MBps.

Can anyone tell me what's the MBps i can typically expect from a Memory slot?

 

[kelvin1704]

I heard that Memory if use a RAM drive would be fast but the capacity will gradually become lesser and lesser as it will creates bad block as memory is not design for such use. Is that true? If so, what can i expect the duration of my RAM drive began to suffer from this issue?

 

[kelvin1704]

anyone?

 

[kelvin1704]

Their reply:

Kelvin,

This is not so .....

The use of RAM in a solid state storage device (SSD) is no different to
the RAM used in your PC. You do not l;ose it as time goes by. A 4 GB SSD
will be still be 4 GB in a number of years. We have been in this space
for over 3 years now and our experience suggests that once the RAM is
burnt in it will run for a long time.

Regards, Support Aust.

 

[kelvin1704]

anyone?

 

[CZroe]

System memory is intended for CONSTANT use. Solid-state FLASH memory drives wear out. The flash memory drives are slower than real hard drives, and are ridiculously expensive. They are used for industrial applications (Like a laptop on a jackhammer or something ). Modern system memory transfers GIGABYTES per second. For example, PC2100 133/266MHz DDR memory transfers 2.1GBps. On a dual-channel nForce board, that's 2.1GBps per DIMM (4.2GBps). With DDR400, 200/400MHz memory, it gets insane! RDRAM is even better, but you wouldn't want to buy gigabytes of that kind of memory.

 

[Bovinicus]

I had a similar thought a few years ago when I discovered such a thing as a RAM drive which my Windows98SE bootdisk created. It seems to me like it wouldn't work to well to put a lot of information on a RAM drive, at least not OS data. This is because there are endless registery entries that refer to files on your harddisk. You would have to change EVERY single one of these for your system to work properly. It is possible that some other piece of application software could be put on a RAM drive for quicker access, but you would still have to spend a lot of money on memory and in my opinion you would be better off just buying a SCSI based drive and controller card if you really want faster harddisk performance. Even IDE RAID is a pretty good alternative solution. So, the main problem you will have is convincing programs that they exist on the RAM drive and not on the harddrive. Otherwise, the information will be in memory, but the program will still access the copy that is stored on your drive. If you find a way around this problem, then I know a way around the problem of copying information to memory every time you shutdown. Instead of shutting down, try hibernating. This is actually the same thing as shutting down except that a file containing all information that was stored in memory at the time of shutdown is stored on your harddrive and automatically copied back to the memory up restart. Standby is also a good alternative. This is because it is capable of turning ALL of your hardware off except for your memory. Good luck in your endless pursuit for the highest performance. However, I just don't think your theory will work as it is intended. Good try though. Hehe.

 

[kelvin1704]

Am getting different opinion from everyone. Wish someone that can sum it all up.

 

[FishTankX]

Okay, I can sum it all up really good. . Adding extra RAM won't help that much with application load speeds unless you've got insufficent RAm right now, but you're best bet would be to throw obscene amounts of physical memory into your system (An extra gig would be nice!) and that would pretty much give you the benefit of a RAMDISK.
In the video conversion process, the CPU is the bottleneck, not the harddisk, I would believe.

These two upgrades would give you a huge boost in performance, if you do both of them at the same time.

+ 2X512MB ECC registered DIMMs. (You'll feel free from virtual memory. Anyone using WindowsXP with 256MB of RAM will feel much pain, trust me)
+80GB 800JB (WD's 8meg cache 80GB drive) which will allow you fast enough transfer rates for the Harddisk not to be a bottle neck.

Do these two, and you'd have the same benefits as you would springing for a RAMDISK, at a fraction of the cost.