New Topic - spun from virtual memory

[NOFX]

Since we were talking about virtual memory and how bad it is, I happen to come across this. as soon as my paychecks start coming in, Im probably going to be purchasing one of these, it claims to start your OS in a fraction of the time. it is 6x faster than Raptors, keep in mind it will only be faster when you are loading stuff.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480

[Norguard]

Interesting concept. RAM drives have actually been in the works for years, now.

 

I had seen another from a Korean firm that oddly enough, drew its power straight from the wall, and didn't have a battery backup. Wether that was bought out by Gigabyte and revamped, or it just died the death of 90% of vapourware, I don't know. It's smartly designed, I'll give it that.

 

Honestly, I wouldn't get too much use out of a single i-RAM drive. If I were going to use them, I'd buy two. One for my WinXP Pro64 install, and one for my Steam install. CS:S and Half-Life 2 should just barely fit. Barely. But that'd give me one big problem - a monstrous lack of wallet.

 

I'd imagine that I'd pay ~$200 for one of those boards up here, in Canadia. Add to that $130+ for each of the four 1GB sticks of ram. Multiply that cost by two, so that I get reasonable access performance from both WinXP and from CS:S and WOW (and I don't mean WarCraft). That'd almost be enough cash for me to buy two GeForce 7800s. I'd be about $300 shy.

 

What they don't show is that you will see more improvements in game performance than just the loading. A lot of new games dynamically load content during levels. CS wouldn't see a huge boost, but you could expect a boost from Half-Life 2. You can't affix every texture/model/shader into a paltry 256MB card anymore. Even with compression. We're talking about gigs of data that have to go back and forth during levels. From what I've experienced with some of the farting, sounds are also not RAM resident until the first time they are used since you've run the game. (in Source at least) They need to be accessed from the drive.

 

The greatest boost, and the #1 reason for wanting something solid-state is audio/video editing. Shifting around multiple 100MB+ or 1000MB+ files, while editing on the fly is a pain when every three seconds you get to kick your feet up as your PC has a brain fart...

 

...however, the i-RAM just can't cater to either. If you properly multitrack a song, it could take up more than half of that RAM itself. And if you're dealing with RAW video that's... ...well, just under 2 minutes. 1:30 if you've got an audio track. Cut those numbers squarely in half, if you're editing Hi-Def (MMMmmmmm, Hi-Def).

 

Personally, I'd take a Raid-0 striped pair of 74GB Raptors, if I was really that concerned with performance. I could stand to wait 4 more seconds for a level to load, and what they aren't showing you is how Raptor drives kick the butt of just about any other IDE drive out there. If they included a standard ATA-100 or ATA-133 drive there (which most of us are still using), you'd see how the i-RAM would decimate the playing field... ...but you'd also see how good you have it by owning a Raptor, even over the majority of the other SATA-150 drives. ...and for the Price of a 4GB i-RAM, I could buy two 74GB 10kRPM Raptors.

 

...last thought for the post: SATA-300 is just around the corner. My board supports it, the drives are "done"... ...we're just waiting on the flagship models to come and spank the old ones. I predict that early models won't be much greater than current SATA drives (much like AGP8x vs PCI-e), but eventually, I'm betting we'll see throughput of 100MBPS, finally.

 

PS: I think too much........

Edited July 28, 2005 by Norguard

[Cujo]

why do they use sata 150?? why not at least sata 2(3gbit/s) or pcie??? this product is already outdated in my opinion.

[NOFX]

well its more about the access times than it is the bandwidth it has to your motherboard.

 

Get 4 of them and setup a stripped Raid Array. Raid your RAM drives heheh

[appalachian_fox]

Neat...but awful pricey for the marginal benefit. I like their idea of a silent home theatre PC, because they have some very quiet fans...But it occurs to me that a small SATA HD and a boatload of RAM could pretty much work the same way, especially if there is a BIOS setting for quiet HDs. It would be an interesting experiment if nothing else. I hope they address the stability issue with RAID, that would be pretty cool. It would get expensive quick, but still pretty darn cool.

 

I also noticed that it runs all RAM at DDR200...I didn't compare all the numbers, but that doesn't seem to be a bottleneck and it makes all that old RAM useful. Of course, I don't happen to have 4 GB of RAM sitting around, DDR200 or otherwise, but it puts a cheaper option on the table for populating the card.

 

Pretty neat, though, pretty neat. If you go this route, let us know how it works out. In similar news I noticed Samsung is getting ready to release a 16GB solid-state hard disk aimed primarily at laptops to reduce the rate of hard drive failure, and other companies (Samsung included iirc) have looked into large solid-state buffers. Neat stuff. I hope nonvolatile storage speed starts moving up in an affordable fashion.

[shep48]

sounds pretty cool

[Norguard]

well its more about the access times than it is the bandwidth it has to your motherboard. 

 

Get 4 of them and setup a stripped Raid Array.  Raid your RAM drives heheh

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

The access times are great, and all, but what's it going to change if it can't get the information to the RAM any faster than your average SATA drive? Even with DDR2100 (which is the speed the drive will be running at), the drive itself can move almost 2GBytes per second... ...well, that's wonderful, but 2Gbps isn't going to help if it can only move 150MBytes/sec to the system RAM.

 

It won't help your gaming, and it certainly won't help your system to still be stuck behind that wall. SATA-300 would be much more appealing in those regards. Or for video/large file editing/sharing.

 

The access time is great, but it won't really do a whole lot for you, without increased performance in data moving. The biggest practical bang I could think of in that scenario (low access time with low bitrate) is loading MP3s. You'd notice a huge jump in MP3 switching, because they're small files that regular hard drives need to jump around to find... ...but I don't think I could limit myself to a 4GB library... ...nor would I pay $400+ for increased MP3 performance.

[NOFX]

Correct me if I am wrong, but here is how I am seeing it. your hard drive has about what a 8ms seek time? As somoene said in the other thread, your virtual drive could possible spread out across the drive which would increase your access times. Say your program has used your virtual memory, or even your whole program is stored in various places on your hard drive and needs to load. I have not done any experments, but I doubt that the 150 MB/s is the bottleneck, wouldn't the bottle neck be in the only mechanical part of a PC? An old school device that resembles something like a record player?

 

Again, Im not refering to FPS and could care less of that, Im refering to being able to load your programs and access/manipulate data from drive..

For example, if I compile 1/100 of our total system at work it takes about 20 seconds to compile. Now if all this info was stored on a solid state drive, wouldnt it be much faster?

[Norguard]

Sorry if it's annoying, but I'm going to think in point form.

 

My SATA drive had an approximate 8ms seek, that's right. Your virtual drive can span across the total of the drive, as Fox mentioned... ...but if you don't exhaust your RAM (a much cheaper, more rewarding upgrade for this situation), you won't touch your virtual RAM (save for Windows itself).

 

Programs are often stored all over your drive, but once loaded, they're RAM resident for the most part. I can't think of many non-games that are larger than a few hundred MBs in their RAM footprint. I can wait an extra 3 seconds for them to load... ...and if their RAM footprint is less than 140MB or so, and they don't rely on loading external scratch disks or external media, (like Photoshop or Premiere) I'm betting you'd see no loading increase... I'll get to that in a second, but it explains why some improvements are so minimal, and yet it shaves 5 seconds off of DooM 3.

 

Talking about the bottleneck, it is the mechanical part - the drive, but there are two aspects of program/media loading. There's access time, and there's throughput, and here's why the current card wouldn't make much practical benefit. The card may pull down the info in 3ms or so, but if that program is more than 150MB (way less, probably... ...more likely a peak of 100MB, just because of motherboards), it can't be transferred to RAM, where it's needed, in under a second. So you've still got this huge 2GB+ highway and a 100MB turnpike. Meanwhile, current, high-end SATA hardware is already averaging a practical peak throughput of 66MB+. The difference in loading those large files will be negligible.

 

Like I said, MP3s are little, scattered and can be accessed by your media program in an instant. They will benefit a lot. So would large media files for editing, but they're disqualified, because they're too large for the current drives.

 

A four drive RAID-0 would work, but Gigabyte mentions that their RAID features don't work yet... ...plus I'd be looking at almost $2000 for that setup.

Edited July 30, 2005 by Norguard

[appalachian_fox]

To be fair, Norguard, just because it appears to be bandwidth-throttled doesn't really mean all that much. Recall bandwidth is the advertised capacity of a channel (SATA as I recall is 150 MB/s) and throughput is the actual use of that channel for a given application. I've looked up some SATA benchmarks on Tom's Hardware (inconclusively) to check on some suspicions I had (http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20030501/wd360-06.html#benchmark_results).

 

It seems that SATA isn't exactly using the bandwidth to its fullest potential yet either, which is what I suspected. However, I agree (and iirc the numbers on the page backed it up) the benefits of loading a large, straight block of data are minimal and not very scalable because of the bandwidth limit on the channel.

 

However, this only addresses the straight and narrow, or rather, it's like rating a performance car only on top speed and acceleration. Handling is important, and handling is very multifaceted, which will lead right into the issue of file fragmentation. Every segment of a file initiates a seek: If a file is in one long strip, it only takes one seek at the beginning, and any speed difference you notice will be in the increased throughput of the technology (unless you are using very sensitive benchmarking programs: microseconds and milliseconds are hard to distinguish to a human).

 

However, have a couple dozen fragments and you have a couple dozen seeks. This is where RAM shines: Random Access. The latency to any given location in memory is, for all intents and purposes, identical. (Purists, I don't think it's fair to call Hard Disks totally Random Access, even though many definitions include them: PM me if you want to take issue). Also, it is really stupid-fast, to borrow a phrase from the kids: On the order of tens of nanoseconds currently iirc. So, if you have a file split into a dozen segments, you add, on average, 8*12 = 96 ms where at 100ns you would add 100ns * 12 = 1200 ns = 1.2 us = .0012ms or, as far as humans can tell, pretty much instantaneous. 100ms = .1 s, and that is getting to the part that can be measured by humans. Fragment your file a lot, or try to read from a lot of separate files, and your seeks jump up dramatically.

 

I also agree that, even if RAID-0 was supported, you'd have to want to be marginally better than everyone a whole lot: 16GB of space across four drives for $2000?

 

But man, the bragging rights they'd bring.

[Frog]

Internet Download/Upload Speed Test

 

Test 1:

Download 5,235,120 bps

Upload 868,256 bps

Round Trip 12ms

Max Pause 47ms

 

Test 2:

Download 5,231,176 bps

Upload 842,840 bps

Round Trip 12ms

Max Pause 47ms

 

 

Not Bad.......

[TheReverend(c)]

I have a cenateck 4gb solid state rocket drive I bought for $600 bucks a few years back outof a server. Pretty zippy unless you kick the power plug out of the wall.

[Cujo]

ummm....