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- Aug 12, 2004
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Just wondering if anyone has tried something like this. At my shop we work on very large images for large format printing. Some get well over 2GB in size. Primarily using Photoshop CS2 and FlexiSign Pro RIP software to deal with them. I am constantly struggling with speed issues when dealing with these files so I've bit the bullet on a new workstation. I've bought a
Dell Precision 690
Dual Xeon 5150 Dual Core 2.66Ghz Processors (1333 FSB)
4 15K 73GB Fujitsu MAX SAS Hard Drives
8GB of FB DIMM RAM. 8 1GB DDR667 Sticks
Here's my quandry. I cannot run 64 bit Windows due to the drivers that the large format printer and cutter require plus Flexi also has sever issues with x64. My plan is this, I'm going to run Windows 2003 Server Enterprise as the operating system since it's about the only 32 bit Windows OS that will support over 4GB of RAM. Since 2003 is essentially using PAE to accomplish this Photoshop etc still only really sees 3GB (running the OS with the /3GB switch) but Windows does see and report the full 8GB in System Properties. What I want to do is use QSoft's RamDISK Enterprise http://www.ramdisk.tk/ to allocate 4GB of the RAM in the system as a RAMDISK. I've paid the devolper $20 for the full unrestricted version of the software with support. I'm going to install and give it a whirl and set Photoshops scratch disk and Flexi's scratch disk to use the new ramdisk.
According to QSoft the newly created ramdisk will allocate the memory before Windows fully loads and Windows will only see the RAM leftover and will see the new ramdisk just like a hard drive. It seems to me this is a much better solution than something like the limited abilities of the card based products like the one from Gigabyte. This uses the systems memory controller and should have the full bandwidth of the systems ram. I'm supposedly only limited by the amount of ram I can put into the machine which in my case is 64GB (this machine has 16 dimm slots). If it works well I might be looking at really dumping a pile of cash into a crapload of ram. This program also fully supports automatically backing up the contents of the ramdisk and restoring the content at shutdown and reboot. Plus the machine is connected to a monitored UPS so it will shut down clean and nice if the power fails and the UPS gets low on juice.
I was really just wondering if anyone has actually tried this and what sort of performance I might expect from the ramdisk.
Cliffs-
Workstation with lots of ram
32 bit OS
Software controlled ramdisk
Massive performance?
Profit?
Dell Precision 690
Dual Xeon 5150 Dual Core 2.66Ghz Processors (1333 FSB)
4 15K 73GB Fujitsu MAX SAS Hard Drives
8GB of FB DIMM RAM. 8 1GB DDR667 Sticks
Here's my quandry. I cannot run 64 bit Windows due to the drivers that the large format printer and cutter require plus Flexi also has sever issues with x64. My plan is this, I'm going to run Windows 2003 Server Enterprise as the operating system since it's about the only 32 bit Windows OS that will support over 4GB of RAM. Since 2003 is essentially using PAE to accomplish this Photoshop etc still only really sees 3GB (running the OS with the /3GB switch) but Windows does see and report the full 8GB in System Properties. What I want to do is use QSoft's RamDISK Enterprise http://www.ramdisk.tk/ to allocate 4GB of the RAM in the system as a RAMDISK. I've paid the devolper $20 for the full unrestricted version of the software with support. I'm going to install and give it a whirl and set Photoshops scratch disk and Flexi's scratch disk to use the new ramdisk.
According to QSoft the newly created ramdisk will allocate the memory before Windows fully loads and Windows will only see the RAM leftover and will see the new ramdisk just like a hard drive. It seems to me this is a much better solution than something like the limited abilities of the card based products like the one from Gigabyte. This uses the systems memory controller and should have the full bandwidth of the systems ram. I'm supposedly only limited by the amount of ram I can put into the machine which in my case is 64GB (this machine has 16 dimm slots). If it works well I might be looking at really dumping a pile of cash into a crapload of ram. This program also fully supports automatically backing up the contents of the ramdisk and restoring the content at shutdown and reboot. Plus the machine is connected to a monitored UPS so it will shut down clean and nice if the power fails and the UPS gets low on juice.
I was really just wondering if anyone has actually tried this and what sort of performance I might expect from the ramdisk.
Cliffs-
Workstation with lots of ram
32 bit OS
Software controlled ramdisk
Massive performance?
Profit?
As another quickie test I copied a 750MB PSD image file to the ramdisk - opening the image in Photoshop from the ramdisk versus from one of the SAS drives - it was incredibly fast, maybe a second - essentially loading from ram into ram versus from disk into ram. I'll post more results after I get some more testing done.