whos got a solid state drive

I was going to add about mine, but looking at these speeds, Im kind of embarrassed now.

Anyway, my old Atari Falcon is running a purely Compact Flash affair.

You get away with it on the older hardware because the Compact Flash is always going to be faster than the ATari can R/W it anyway.

I have a pair of dual CF Adapters with a 512MB for C: and a 4GB for D: to G: and a 4GB for H: to M: and a 1GB for N: and the CDs, ZIP etc are SCSI.

For a short while, I did toy with the paif or 4GB Cards in single adapters, on an SIL0680 RAID card and it was fun, but the speeds were somethign like 9MB/s RAIDED so nothign to write home about.

It is going back a short while now though.
 
Yes, 32GB is useable for Vista... If you are careful.

16GB however is pretty much a pagefile and thats it!

Wont RAID? - Surely thats the job of the RAID controler isnt it?
 
16GB is big enough for XP and all my applications...

Mtron apparently told them not to bother, maybe they're just trying to protect their margins with the Pro drive. Looks like DVnation has 2 and 4 of them in RAID 0 though.
 
Yes, for XP 16GB is more than enough.

I myself have always had my XP Partition as small as possible, it used to be 5GB, now its at 8GB and I find this plenty as I never install anything other than systools / utilities etc to C:
 
Wouldn't filling your motherboard with RAM and utilising that as a RAM drive be a more cost effective way of doing this?
 
PiKe said:
Wouldn't filling your motherboard with RAM and utilising that as a RAM drive be a more cost effective way of doing this?
Click to expand...

1) It won't help boot times.

2) Assuming you use 2Gig sticks the max amount of memory you'll fit on a typical board would be 8Gig, allow 4 for normal use and the resulting 4Gig RAM drive isn't really very useful for much cf even a 16Gig SSD.
 
PiKe said:
Wouldn't filling your motherboard with RAM and utilising that as a RAM drive be a more cost effective way of doing this?
Click to expand...

But then you cannot boot from it.
Unless of course you can do something magical like cause a paradox like an Atari does.

( Atari ST cannot access a HD, so, in order to do this, it loads up a Hard Disk Driver.... From the HD... That it cannot access??? ARGH? )

So, while in theory, if you had a silly ammount of RAM, you could create a RAMDISK, and sure, you could do that, but why?

It will not make thigns any faster.

However, using RAM as a Hard Disk in order to boot windows up into that RAMDISK, and have windows run from that RAMDISK, it would make thigns fairly nippy yes.

I think however, that tech is at a stage where HDs are so fast and are getting faster all the time, that this kind of tech is almost unecessary ... As thigns stand anyway... The price does not truly justify the speed...
 
A lil off topic but had to respond

FatRakoon said:
So, while in theory, if you had a silly ammount of RAM, you could create a RAMDISK, and sure, you could do that, but why?

It will not make thigns any faster.
Click to expand...

Well if your like me and have your games on another drive then it can make games quicker to load. This is only really evident in FPS games where its a good thing to be first in the server. Class restricted games like TF2, DOD, BF2 where the server limits the type of class used, its a must.

My opinion is that if you have a good drive with the OS installed, why not compliment it with a RAMDISK setup?

My 6gb Ramdisk (red) vs Onboard and RAID Card connected I-RAM's (8gb).

ramdrive.jpg
 
Yes, I do have my Games on a seperate drive. I have seperate drives for all my stuff... Kind of explains why I need massive Cases and my Electricity bill is so high?

But, yes, in such thing, its quite obvious that they will benefit, on the face of things, but you have to look at things logically...

Its a 6GB RAMDISK you have yes?
How many games can you cram onto that?
Come to think of it, even if you have it setup so it loads up the one game you are going o play, then these days, will the game fit?
UT3, Gears Of War, hell, even many older games simply will not fit into just 6GB
Even for the games that do, there will not be as much of a benefit as benchmarks will give out... What games have you actually installed to that RAMDISK and actually run, and more importantly, was there any real benefit?

I know that benchmarks are taken too literally in many things, and they can actually be a total contradiciton on the real truth in many ways, so I myself dont usually fall for them anymore, so have you actually taken the speed of your 6GB drive and used in a real-world scenario for any length of time and actually given it a true trial?
 
Yeah, I know about huge cases, one of the reasons I plumped for a NAS drive. Far easier to take my music round to house parties too ;)

Your right with the 6gb being a restriction. I only usually have the main game I am playing installed. The ramdisk program I use can save the entire information of the ramdisk to an image file. It does this whenever i click save, or whenever I set the time on the autosave function. So i could set it to save every 5 mins if I wished. This saves /updates the image to the drive of your choice. It then reloads this image whenever I click load image, it can also be set to load the image at startup.

The following games have an image file on my hard drive so fit.
Company of heroes - Had to use 6.5gb ramdisk size and leave 1.5gb as system memory.
Call of Duty / Call of Duty UO / Call of Duty2 all have an image.
Overlord (non Steam)
Steam with only TF2 installed is 6.36gb so had to do the same as COH and leave 1.5gb free for system memory.
Battlefield1 and 2, used at a LAN only and I was consistantly first on map change. We played in teams and as I am a noob at this game I was always told by my team for which side to play. lol
WiC demo
Bioshock (non steam)
Stalker

Real world benefits,
Always waiting for other players before starting a COH game. Hardly a benefit!
Call of Duty and UO - i am always in before other players and have the benefit of rolling a map, choosing a map, choosing killcam on/off before any other players have chance to join and vote.
TF2 on steam, only a few servers modded for classes, mainly the skyscraper map and orange-x custome map servers i use. Im usually the first too choose!
Have not played overlord online, but singleplayer is quick and snappy.
Bioshock is quick to load levels.
Stalker is great online, I have usually purchased kit and in place before anyone joins.

This is quicker than my (now sold) I-Ram RAID setup in performance. Also if your reading this Jokester, the two I-Rams were a PIA to detect on cold boot. Sometimes the RAID bios would only detect one drive! On subsequent reboots it would be a lot quicker. It was too flakey for an XP install though.

Funny you should mention GOW, I have bought GOW here while in Canada, but not installed yet. Its huge! Over 12gb install!

I am currently in Canada on my laptop (have been for a few weeks) and using this 4800 drive is painful when loading games.

The games do run, they are installed to the ramdrive and the reg settings are present. How long have I used a Ramdrive? Julyish 07.

Take a trip down memory (hehe....sorry) lane here
 
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in the end, who cares how fast boot up time is? with a decent preset cache system most of the common use .exe's will be in memory and start loading before any hard drive can start. my boot time is, baring my board seemingly having an insanely long raid controller find all the drives wigging out session, extremely quick. i leave my computer on all day 10 second boot or 5 min boot, in the end, would mean nothing but with raided 250gb seagate 7200.11's its maybe i dunno, FAR less than a minute, 20/30 seconds maybe.

as for gaming, they don't help. check reviews of a hitachi 1tb drive vs a raptor, or raptors in raid, and the hitachi tb's in raid. in almost all games the difference is sub 5% speed boost despite large differences between the drives seek times themselves, and in raid a 80-90% transfer speed boost. reason, game loading times aren't dependant on hdd's only, they have to load vid's, stream the vids, switch adverts(though we all hate and skip them all) load lots of stuff into vid mem, etc, etc, etc. again, most games have extremely short load times to menu and low load times into games and faster drives aren't improving that time, lots of cpu presetting of levels to be done.

gonna be very few situations in home use that raid, let alone solid state will give any benefit. server use is where low latency's at, more people would use scsi for the last decade, at home, if it made any real difference. its only when you access different parts of the drive constantly which generally needs multiple users.

now solid state is going to be VERY nice when its price comparable gb for gb with normal drives, power usage, silence, temps, hopefully high quality production will drop defects and chance of failure. but, just as likely for a ram chip to be faulty, as the drive bearings to go tbh. the chance of silence will be the biggest draw of them for me, but, they need to get a heck of a lot cheaper.
 
Nah, this is only true under certain circumstances...

I currently do not have any RAID setups at this time, but a couple of hours ago, I had a pair of Hitachi 80GBs that were Striped.

Now, what you say about VIDs and so on, I do see what you are saying, but this has not been the case for me.

Some games for sure, gained, and some did not.

The area I found that gained was in the little things such as HalfLife2 where each section has to load in... The times here dropped enough to notice, and such games as Dawn Of War, where there is a lot of these "Videos" loading up on start up, sure, they load up, but as you press Escape, to bypass them, the game laods up many times quicker.

So, for me, there was a difference.

Defragging too... I use O&O DeFrag and you can see every single little bit of the HD and where its currently working on etc, and I can honestly say that the difference between Singloe Drive and Raided Drives there, was quite astonishing to see...

However... On the whole face of it... I would say that for 99.9% of Home users, RAID is simply NOT worth the effort.

If you see yourself needing to access lots of data at a time, then perhaps, but other than that, you are going to shave a few seconds off the laoding of an App, but thats really all there is to it.

I myself prefer to use the Multiple HD option. I dont have any RAID setups as I said and thats because I have found, that having seperate Drives for each category of my files, has proven to be a hell of a lot faster than having a couple of larger drives Raided.

Each to his or her own though on this one.

Now as for the actualy thread concerning Solid state Drives, I was one of the lucky ones who bought myself a paid of Gigabyte Drives, and filled them both up with 4GB, and was able to test the difference between them on their own and in a RAID situation ( I used an SIL0680 Card as at the time, I had just built a BootCD with Raid drivers for that card on CD and I needed to test it... )

I was a little dissappointed tat the speed, while quicker than the HD, was certainly NOT worth the money... Even Raided, it was not very quick at all, and I think that drives of today are quicker.

I no longer have the things, and I do not regret selling them off... Maybe another couple of years perhaps, but if they are anythign like the Gigabyte ones, I wont be buying them unless they drop in price by a massive way.
 
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