Ramdisc + readyboost + SSD

PhoenixUK · 14 Jul 2009 at 11:10

hawker1986 said:
So feel free to tell me how my systems have been coping for a year without pagefile running without and problems or BSODs? And I run all sorts of programs from Games, office, VMs, photoshop, CAD etc etc etc.

Hawker

I didn't use it for about a year when with 4GB on one of my systems.
Havn't had a single problem and the performance in games ( mainly AoC back then ) increased by quite a bit but that's maybe because when I play games, I don't really have more than a firefox, winamp, msn and maybe another program or two open. Hence 4GB was plenty and I hardly ever filled it up. Had yet to see more than 3 or so being used.

Unless you do rendering/encoding AND gaming at very high res at the same time it will be hard to fill up more than 4 : ).

Mattus · 14 Jul 2009 at 17:07

hawker1986 said:
I do appologise about my pagefile comment, I should have made it clearer just for the pedantic people on this forum, rather than keeping it simple for the OP who hadnt worked all this out himself. For the normal PC user, who doesnt do anything hardcore like run multiple VMs etc then in a PC with 4Gb+ RAM it can be safely turned off, because they will never use that much RAM for it to be a problem.

To me, that's like saying 'don't bother wearing a seatbelt - most of the time you won't stop quickly enough to need it'. It might be OK to turn it off most of the time, but what's the point? I've never seen it proven that turning it off yields a performance advantage, and it could make your apps crash.

hawker1986 · 14 Jul 2009 at 17:13

Well a persons life and a computer crashing are the same sort of thing after all...anyhow my point is that ive never had an app crash, ive never managed to run that low of RAM, and neither will a normal user on a PC with over 4Gb RAM.

Hawker

Mattus · 14 Jul 2009 at 17:23

And my point is that there is no point doing something that has a proven drawback but no demonstrated advantage.

hawker1986 · 14 Jul 2009 at 17:36

If you dont use every last mb of your RAM (and if you do then you need more!) there is no drawback and there are advantages like the fact your not constantly accessing and wearing your HDD (esp an SSD) and your not using something slow (the HDD) to do something which can be done much quicker with RAM. Windows will use the pagefile if its there, if you remove it it has no choice but to use the RAM, to me this is an optimisation.

Mattus · 14 Jul 2009 at 17:39

Well, if you're happy in the knowledge that you've introduced a factor that could crash your rig at the point when you're working it hardest, go ahead. I'd prefer my apps to be stable under all circumstances.

Glaucus · 14 Jul 2009 at 17:40

So How does ramdisck work. I know it's software controlled and emulates a hdd. But how and what does it put on the disk. Say you wanted a game to completely run from it. What would you do? install it on the drive then make a back up image. Then reload the image if you reboot the computer?
what speeds is it compared to say the 220/200 of an ssd.

Mattus · 14 Jul 2009 at 17:44

Yep - put stuff onto the RAMDisk, then back it up onto a hard drive before you shut down and restore it when you boot up.

It's much faster than an SSD. Would depend on the system, but I'd say more than 3000/3000 would be reasonable. (If it was done in software - if you had one of those PCI cards, you'd be limited by the PCI bus.)

Glaucus · 14 Jul 2009 at 17:49

it sounds like it could be fun to have a play with. If you have a ddr3 triple channel system and get 24Gb of ram.
12Gb would be enough for most games I would imagine.
And you could make a different image for each game.

seeing as COD world at war is 7.1GB it would be hard to do on a normal dual channel MOBo wih out being silly expensive as you would need 2 x 8GB sets.

hawker1986 · 14 Jul 2009 at 18:01

Mattus said:
Well, if you're happy in the knowledge that you've introduced a factor that could crash your rig at the point when you're working it hardest, go ahead. I'd prefer my apps to be stable under all circumstances.

Well since all those of you who seem to think that running without a pagefile is going to make your system unstable are unwilling to try it and prove yourselves right, and I (and others) have been running it for ages on multiple systems without any instability, I guess weve come to a bit of a loggerheads. Im going to stop arguing now

.

RAMdisks are hugely interesting, but doing one using software limits your system RAM and running a hardware one for anything more than testing purposes has significant problems with possible dataloss and just the cost of enough RAM. I think ive seen one that takes DDR2, but not DDR3. Ive always looked at them whistfully, but I poweroff my system regularly from the wall and keeping it up and running would be a total pain.

Hawker

Glaucus · 14 Jul 2009 at 18:06

how do you build a hardware ram disk? is there boards out there you plug ram into?

Anyone know any guides or info on hardware ones?

silversurfer · 14 Jul 2009 at 18:09

I read about a pci ramboard yep

hawker1986 · 14 Jul 2009 at 18:12

Yeah there are a number of solutions, gigabyte I-RAM is one I think but that uses DDR1 and is basically a PCI slot card. Another is one that goes into a drive bay and is DDR2 I think it connects over SATA? I might be wrong about that. But if so it sort of defeats the point as youll be limited by the SATA badwidth.

PhoenixUK · 14 Jul 2009 at 18:14

Mattus said:
Well, if you're happy in the knowledge that you've introduced a factor that could crash your rig at the point when you're working it hardest, go ahead. I'd prefer my apps to be stable under all circumstances.

If you actually get to the point when your game starts using the pagefile you'll see how much it can slow down, no matter fast your CPU or GPU is, you will most likely get a small freezes every now and then.

And because windows is dumb, even if your memory is not filled up it will randomly start making pagefile at random times as soon as you exceed 2GB even if it's not needed.

Now as long as it's single player game, it won't bother you much but when you play online it gets worse. Now when I've been playing AoC which liked to use large amount of memory and getting to about 3GB after some time was normal - with pagefile switched on as soon as the memory hits about 2,5 it would kick in and everytime it reads/writes give me along with the way network works a short 0,5-1s, sometimes 2sec freeze.

If you played some games at the high ladder or even professionaly, you would know that 0,5sec freeze could make your whole team loose.

After switching pagefile, the RAM usage topped around 3.3-3.5 and it would run a lot smoother without any slowdowns.

I would rather get more RAM if I needed it so much rather than using pagefile.
If it was so good people will just buy 1GB of memory and set 8GB pagefile.

Glaucus · 14 Jul 2009 at 18:22

That's dissapointing teh only ddr2 pci card I can find is the
ACard's ANS-9010 Serial ATA RAM disk but it's a whopping £200 if you buy from america or £330 if you buy from the Uk and does not include the ram.
but 6 slots. So you could get 3x4GB sets which would run most games.
But ouch at the card.
also has two sata slots so you can make it into two drives and raid0 it. Max speed is 3000read 400write and 64GB max capcity and a cf card reader for back up image.

Oh just seen a review and even in raid 0 it only managed 170 so below that of most ssd

hawker1986 · 14 Jul 2009 at 18:28

Ahhh nice find mate, thats the one I was thinking of, it is prohibitively expensive, and the backup to CF takes quite a while 15min if I remember correctly. The techreport did a review of it if your interested. Surely the max speed of even two sata ports raided is 600mbps....

Hawker

Glaucus · 14 Jul 2009 at 18:40

Yeah that review is damning,slower than the high performance ssds.
Only way to do it would be with a ddr3 system and 4GB ram moduals. Easily creating a 12-16GB software conrolled hdd.

Mattus · 14 Jul 2009 at 18:47

hawker1986 said:
Well since all those of you who seem to think that running without a pagefile is going to make your system unstable are unwilling to try it and prove yourselves right, and I (and others) have been running it for ages on multiple systems without any instability

You obviously missed Fire Wizard's post, which demonstrated that it can cause instability. If Windows allocates an emergency page file, why did it not do so in his case?

PhoenixUK said:
I would rather get more RAM if I needed it so much rather than using pagefile.
If it was so good people will just buy 1GB of memory and set 8GB pagefile.

Huh? Nobody's saying that using the pagefile is as good as using physical RAM. It's just nice to have it there if you do run short on RAM. I don't use all of my RAM most of the time, but there are times when I have, and I'm glad that none of my apps crashed!

Maybe it's OK if you're going for top gaming performance, but I'd hate it if I was halfway through a long video encode and the program crashed because I was out of RAM, or - even worse - if I lost work.

PhoenixUK · 14 Jul 2009 at 18:54

Mattus said:
You obviously missed Fire Wizard's post, which demonstrated that it can cause instability. If Windows allocates an emergency page file, why did it not do so in his case?

Huh? Nobody's saying that using the pagefile is as good as using physical RAM. It's just nice to have it there if you do run short on RAM. I don't use all of my RAM most of the time, but there are times when I have, and I'm glad that none of my apps crashed!

Maybe it's OK if you're going for top gaming performance, but I'd hate it if I was halfway through a long video encode and the program crashed because I was out of RAM, or - even worse - if I lost work.

I however, do wish that it was being utilized more efficent than it is now, ie. it should jump in with dumping into pagefile with just 2.5 out of 4GB memory used.

It is really really bad idea to have it on when you're playing professionally online.

For other apps, yeh I guess it's fine : ). If your 3dmax or photoshop stops for a sec it won't matter much.

I guess it all comes to how much of the memory you use and what you do.

JonJ678 · 14 Jul 2009 at 19:30

AcidHell2 said:
Yeah that review is damning,slower than the high performance ssds.

Sums up the problem with them neatly. Hardware ram disks, battery backed up or not, are just not a success.

As for what one is, you mark say a 4gb patch of ram as occupied, and flag it so parts aren't moved to swap/pagefile. This now appears in explorer etc as a 4gb unformatted volume. Computer considers it a hard disk in most respects. You then format this area as whatever you like, I use xfs. ntfs would work too. It's then a completely normal drive, except for being mental fast and losing all data if you turn the computer off.

Software based are brilliant. For a game, yeah you install to the ramdisk then make an image of it. Simple as you could ask for. Savegames vanish if you reboot obviously. In windows there are a couple of programs you use for this, I played with them for a bit but wasn't particularly impressed. I suspect they vary in quality and picking the right one is important. Linux does it rather easily, as most distributions have the software built in.

Its not as exciting as the above, but I write logs and temporary files to a ramdisk. This spares my hard drive making multiple little writes, which lets it do more interesting things faster. Periodically I install xp to a 4gb ramdisk for the fun of having it load ludicrously fast, and microsoft excel is just excellent when the entire system is in ram. I do this through virtualbox on a linux host, rather than through hardware.