Think your SSD can beat my Ram Drive?

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tangoseal

[H]F Junkie
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This is just posted for fun but I was amazed at the numbers.

If SSD's could only do this then we'd all be in heaven:

This a 2GB RamDisk I am testing out. I am going to install 16GB of ram soon and run a 12GB Ram Disk and load the game I play the most at the time from it. I might just put the system swap file there too.

RamDISK.PNG.jpg

RamDISK2.PNG.jpg


Look at the IOPS (Rediculous):
Ramdisk3.PNG.jpg


Maybe they should just sell us a box filled with 256GB of DDR3-1600 and a battery to keep it alive all the time haha then we can have a real SSD that doesnt die after a few thousand erase cycles.
 
jeremyshaw said:
Awesome numbers!:eek:
Wish my laptop could do this for work :(
Click to expand...

Well its a ram drive so you are limted by 2 things really:

1.) Capacity, motherboard can only handle so much ram.
2.) It can't hold its charge with the power off so you lose all your data and have to make sure that you write to a image file before you power down and have to load that same image file when you power on.

But gonna be killer for running windows 7 swap file from.
 
I built a machine last week, dual Nehalem Xeons with actual triple channel DDR3 and was pulling in close to 13.5GB/s so, yeah, I can hang with the OP and even leave him standing still... ;)

As for the "negatives":

1) True, but if you're truly truly serious, you'd be building a machine based off a mobo with 12 slots on it anyway. :D

2) You already covered it, and it depends on the RAMdisk software you happen to be using (which I'm curious about anyway). I've been using SuperSpeed's RAMdisk software for over a decade and currently using RamDisk Plus as usual but I'm "RAM strapped" on my current box with only 4GB in it presently, older DDR2 800 so I pull about 3.5GB/s reads when testing.

Been telling people about RAMdisks for decades - literally decades as I used to run my Amiga 500 way back in 1985 and could warm boot the machine off a 1MB RAMdisk. Nice to see some folks are finally catching on... ;)
 
I can't wait for upcoming non-volatile memory technologies like PCM which are about the same speed as DRAM, but don't lose their contents on power loss. That'd make for a heck of an SSD :D
 
tangoseal said:
Maybe they should just sell us a box filled with 256GB of DDR3-1600 and a battery to keep it alive all the time haha then we can have a real SSD that doesnt die after a few thousand erase cycles.
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They sell one, it's called a RAMSAN.
 
LightningCrash said:
They sell one, it's called a RAMSAN.
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According to their comparison chart, all but the lowest end model use flash memory.

And even then, they are network devices which is going to kill speed and they are way too cost prohibitive for a home user.

The current fastest way would be to have a card that uses PCI-E 2.0 x16 and accepts sticks of DDR3.

Even then you would only get around 8GB/s which pales in comparison to the 34GB/s I get with my sig rig.

Once PCI-E 3 comes out, it should be possible to get close to 16GB/s... still a far cry from what the RAM can actually do.

edit: for example.. something like this, except something that actually uses a 2.0 x16 slot.
http://www.ddrdrive.com/
 
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If only it wasn't $100 per 8GB. That's like a minimum of $500 just to fit the operating system and few applications. :(
 
jeremyshaw said:
Ah... also the adobe scratch space for Photoshop :D
Click to expand...

I'm still using CS3 so the actual RAM it can use is limited So that's exactly what I did for Photoshop and Premiere. I have a 3 GB RAM disk that I use as my scratch file. It's pretty impressive!
 
cyclone3d said:
According to their comparison chart, all but the lowest end model use flash memory.

And even then, they are network devices which is going to kill speed and they are way too cost prohibitive for a home user.
Click to expand...

i got a good laugh out of that one

ever heard of 10GbE?
 
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Elledan said:
I can't wait for upcoming non-volatile memory technologies like PCM which are about the same speed as DRAM, but don't lose their contents on power loss. That'd make for a heck of an SSD :D
Click to expand...

And price tag...
 
Mind putting up a simple guide to setting up the RAMdisk via whatever software you are using and putting the Windows 7 swapfile onto it? I am intrigued.
 
What would be nice is a gaming performance motherboard (CF and or SLI capable) with an extra 8-12 slots for ram for this.
 
Why do people think putting the swap file in a RAM drive is even a remotely good idea... the swap file moves stuff out of RAM to the file to make more room in RAM for applications that currently need it. How does anybody think moving RAM from one spot to another could possibly help that? Take whatever size you were going to make your RAM swap file and just make your RAM disk that much smaller and leave the swap file where it's supposed to be, on a drive of some sort, far better use of resources.
 
Windows pages, period. Anything you can do that can help improve the efficiency of that process can be beneficial even if it's only measurable in percentage points measured in 10ths of a point. It all adds up in the long run.

While I'm not the OP I would surely not like to see this particular thread devolve into a war over virtual memory subsystems and RAMdisks and ne'er the twain shall meet points of view...

I build machines with 16GB+ of RAM for clients, and I optimize them to points where shit happens nearly instantly and I do it with huge RAMdisks that basically take the slowest part of modern computers - the storage mediums - out of the equation to the greatest extents possible.

Even SSDs are "slow" compared to pure RAM speeds, seriously slow in comparison. When you're dealing with disk-based operating systems aka all modern ones, anytime you can lessen the reliability of the OS on physical media (hard drives) and even Flash storage (SSDs) you'll see benefits from it, and that's what I focus on primarily above and beyond most anything else.

"And that's all I have to say about that..." :p

<Note I didn't say anything about a page file in this post...>
 
Our minecraft server uses a 2 gb ramdisk in a 24hr-on server. The image backs-up every logon/logoff for about 20 people who visit the server. Great config and runs smooth.
 
Joe Average said:
Windows pages, period. Anything you can do that can help improve the efficiency of that process can be beneficial even if it's only measurable in percentage points measured in 10ths of a point. It all adds up in the long run.

While I'm not the OP I would surely not like to see this particular thread devolve into a war over virtual memory subsystems and RAMdisks and ne'er the twain shall meet points of view...

I build machines with 16GB+ of RAM for clients, and I optimize them to points where shit happens nearly instantly and I do it with huge RAMdisks that basically take the slowest part of modern computers - the storage mediums - out of the equation to the greatest extents possible.

Even SSDs are "slow" compared to pure RAM speeds, seriously slow in comparison. When you're dealing with disk-based operating systems aka all modern ones, anytime you can lessen the reliability of the OS on physical media (hard drives) and even Flash storage (SSDs) you'll see benefits from it, and that's what I focus on primarily above and beyond most anything else.

"And that's all I have to say about that..." :p

<Note I didn't say anything about a page file in this post...>
Click to expand...


I would challenge you to find or make one benchmark no matter how artificial where a system that has had its RAM partitioned into a RAM drive then loaded with a page file performs better than the same exact system without that setup because I don't think you can find or make one.

P.S. You realize that windows, like unix, maps executables and libraries to memory right? A lot of the paging it does in high memory systems doesn't even touch the page file but is done directly from the .exe and .dll files, which is why windows locks those files so they can't be modified since they're effectively RAM now.
 
Yah, we could all see that one coming a mile away. ;)

The inevitable "I DOUBLE DOG DARE YA!!!" challenge... I don't provide benchmarks and such since a) people would question my results and b) people should be able to do all this themselves and get their own results. It's much easier to do than most realize, to be honest, just takes a little elbow grease, as the saying goes.

As for how the memory works, yeah, I know, was using UNIX long before most people outside colleges and universities even knew what it was but that's a long long time ago. The basic principles still hold true, even with Windows. It is possible to extract more performance from any given setup - I do it pretty much every day and have done so since the mid-1970s...
 
Windows pagefile can't be put on a ramdisk since when you reboot/startup windows likes the pagefile to reside on a drive/partition which appears early in the windows boot sequence. Since the ramdisk is run via software which is loaded after windows boots windows would auto-create a new pagefile in the default location.

AFAIK.
 
Well I don't have any proof of mine either so we'll have to go with no proof either way, frankly I don't know any good benchmarks to run this on but I can't, logically, see any way X - Y memory with Y page file in RAM disk could possibly be better than just straight X RAM. You seem to think otherwise but have nothing to back it up either because it's apparently beneath you.
 
THOMO said:
Windows pagefile can't be put on a ramdisk since when you reboot/startup windows likes the pagefile to reside on a drive/partition which appears early in the windows boot sequence. Since the ramdisk is run via software which is loaded after windows boots windows would auto-create a new pagefile in the default location.

AFAIK.
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It is actually possible to install a ram drive that is loaded early enough to make it possible. It can make sense to do it on an OS that limits how much of your physical ram you can use (like 32bit Windows).
 
^^ hmmmm you've got me interested now. Must go research, see what I can find.
 
THOMO said:
Windows pagefile can't be put on a ramdisk since when you reboot/startup windows likes the pagefile to reside on a drive/partition which appears early in the windows boot sequence. Since the ramdisk is run via software which is loaded after windows boots windows would auto-create a new pagefile in the default location.

AFAIK.
Click to expand...

Yes, you can assign a page file to a RAMdisk given the RAMdisk driver and configuration software allow for such actions - SuperSpeed's RamDisk Plus was the first such product to allow for this a few years ago, but other products now also take advantage of that potential option.

RamDisk Plus also has the ability on a 32 bit version of Windows with more than 4GB of system RAM in it to make use of the RAM above the "limit" of about 3.25GB which can prove interesting as well.

-Dragon-:

Just one piece of advice - don't make it personal, which would obviously be beneath you, I'm guessing.

I don't have to prove anything to anyone - you can do that yourself.

I made it very simple with what I said earlier but I'll repeat it again just for shits and giggles:

Anytime you can lessen the reliability of the OS on physical media (hard drives) and even Flash storage (SSDs) you'll see benefits from it.

That also applies to the virtual memory subsystem (which the page file is just a small part of). You and many others focus on "oh, the page file, the page file, THE PAGE FILE!!!" and that's just a tiny part of the whole subsystem.

There's a lot more going on that you can improve that isn't just the page file.
 
Misread first post, I use RAM disks too for frequently and randomly accessed files as well (despite SSDs) but I'd never dream of throwing a pagefile on it. RAM disks definitely have value in high RAM systems, but I can't see any possible benefit of swapping RAM around the way a pagefile would.
 
You can find a benefit in the feature of some ram drives that can use memory that 32bit Windows will not touch. If you use that memory for a pagefile then you win some.
 
-Dragon- said:
I would challenge you to find or make one benchmark no matter how artificial where a system that has had its RAM partitioned into a RAM drive then loaded with a page file performs better than the same exact system without that setup because I don't think you can find or make one.

P.S. You realize that windows, like unix, maps executables and libraries to memory right? A lot of the paging it does in high memory systems doesn't even touch the page file but is done directly from the .exe and .dll files, which is why windows locks those files so they can't be modified since they're effectively RAM now.
Click to expand...

All he would have to do is come up with something that relies heavily on disk write speed to the RAM drive, since Win doesn't do delayed allocation
 
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LightningCrash said:
And your RAM is a measly 6gb.
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What does that have to do with anything?

6GB is NOT the speed of my RAM, it is the amount.

We are talking speed here.

10Gb (Gb = gigabit, GB = gigabyte)

A byte is made up of 8 bits.

So when you see the Gb notation, you can know that dividing it by 8 will give you the number of GB.
 
cyclone3d said:
What does that have to do with anything?

6GB is NOT the speed of my RAM, it is the amount.

We are talking speed here
Click to expand...


No, you were comparing your 6GB of RAM to X amount of RAM plus a 512GB RamSan 440.

512GB = 549 755 813 888 bytes

A byte is made up of 8 bits.

512GB = 4 398 046 511 104 bits

6GB = 51 539 607 552 bits

512GB > 6GB

Thanks.
 
tangoseal said:
Maybe they should just sell us a box filled with 256GB of DDR3-1600 and a battery to keep it alive all the time haha then we can have a real SSD that doesnt die after a few thousand erase cycles.
Click to expand...

It doesn't have a battery, and it's really noisy, but Dell R910 servers can hold up to 1TB of DDR3. :D
 
LightningCrash said:
No, you were comparing your 6GB of RAM to X amount of RAM plus a 512GB RamSan 440.

512GB = 549 755 813 888 bytes

A byte is made up of 8 bits.

512GB = 4 398 046 511 104 bits

6GB = 51 539 607 552 bits

512GB > 6GB

Thanks.
Click to expand...

I was comparing the speed.. not the capacity.
 
tangoseal said:
This is just posted for fun but I was amazed at the numbers.
Click to expand...

Here let me quote my self since I am the OP.

The point to this thread was the above. If you wanna flame each others points of views that is cool. I thought it was fun to see those high numbers and all I was doing was stating the fact that it sure would be nice if we could get SSDs to that level of performance. 290K IOPS etc...

I honestly cant find a single applicable purpose for me to use that drive.
 
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