Vista 5219 review..

Very nice indeed. Looks like Vista is now heading in a good direction. Time to re-think my initial thoughts I had on it.
 
TechHead said:
http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_5219.asp

Liked the part about the USB stick being used as RAM. Hope they implement it properly.
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They will prolly hack it together and thus u put a floppy in their and it will try to use that


In build 5219, Microsoft has enabled a new Windows Vista feature called Super Fetch, which examines your system over time, determines which applications you most typically load, and then preloads code from those apps in order to later speed application launch times and responsiveness. Super Fetch isn't just about caching, however. In a potentially blockbuster move, this feature will also let you use USB-based flash memory sticks as additional RAM for Super Fetch. That's right, folks: Stick in a 1 GB USB stick and you get 1 GB (or whatever) of super-fast cache RAM (encrypted for security) and an instant speed boost. I don't yet know a lot about this feature, but suffice to say I'm expecting a briefing soon. This could be revolutionary, especially for notebook users who can't easily boost RAM (or do so at all).
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Serious doubts abt this statement. USB even USB2 is alot slower then a HD and a hell of alot slower still then RAM so how can a USB-drive be interpreted as "super-fast cache RAM"

Sorry but that statement alone is boolox
 
eeyrjmr said:
They will prolly hack it together and thus u put a floppy in their and it will try to use that




Serious doubts abt this statement. USB even USB2 is alot slower then a HD and a hell of alot slower still then RAM so how can a USB-drive be interpreted as "super-fast cache RAM"

Sorry but that statement alone is boolox
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Yeah my thoughts exactly. Sorry to tell them, but usb flash drives aren't fast. Not at all.
 
eeyrjmr said:
Serious doubts abt this statement. USB even USB2 is alot slower then a HD and a hell of alot slower still then RAM so how can a USB-drive be interpreted as "super-fast cache RAM"

Sorry but that statement alone is boolox
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Isn't the limiting factor when paging actually disk latency (that is, seek time plus rotational latency) and not throughput?

A high-speed USB device has a bandwidth limit of 57 MiB/S, which is about as fast as the real transfer rate a the commodity desktop IDE- and SATA- based drive.
 
that's the theoritical max...but good luck getting that in real life. My raptor has a bandwidth limit of 150 MB/s, but I'm lucky to get 65 MB/s of real sustained speeds. Same for usb drives.
 
Eva_Unit_0 said:
that's the theoritical max...but good luck getting that in real life. My raptor has a bandwidth limit of 150 MB/s, but I'm lucky to get 65 MB/s of real sustained speeds. Same for usb drives.
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Sure. But your higher sustained speed is meaningless, since the drive spends much of its time seeking and waiting during the load scenario. Like I said, the extremely low latency the of the solid-state drive will quickly offset its lower burst rate for scearios dominated by ranom access.

I think someone who dismisses the idea hasn't thought it through.
 
neo86 said:
Don't USB flash sticks have a limited # of writes?
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Yes, flash memory wears out. The number I've heard most often is about 10,000 read/write cycles. If that feature isn't implemented carefully it'll just eat them up.
 
tdg said:
Yes, flash memory wears out. The number I've heard most often is about 10,000 read/write cycles. If that feature isn't implemented carefully it'll just eat them up.
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The feature does't need to be carefully implemented in Windows. The flash controller actually implements the ability to spread reads across the device, mapping blocks to different logical locations to spread "wear" evenly across the device.

It's not hard to find modern devices that can handle 100,000 writes at a minimum.
 
I'm pretty sure that if this catches on and makes things faster in vista they will do something to solve the problem with memory writes wearing out. Or another thing is that those 1 gig memory keys are getting pretty cheap and by the time vista is out a 1 gig memory key will be mega cheap. Be like a 20 dollar wallmart price.
 
The USB stick thing isn't a "replcement" or "add-on" for RAM per say. It's used to store prefetching data, which doesn't change from boot to boot. It shouldn't get written to *that* often.

This is Vista the key that spawned the "superfetch helps XP tweak".

edit: don't confuse this as additional virtual memory, it's the prefetch for virtual memory, as in what to preload.

Link
 
Phoenix86 said:
edit: don't confuse this as additional virtual memory, it's the prefetch for virtual memory, as in what to preload.
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Right. And that's why the slower throughput of the key isn't harmful to the performance of the feature; the benefit comes from latency improvements. Those are significant because reads caused by page faults for an image as it loads and initializes usually result in random seeks.
 
mikeblas said:
Right. And that's why the slower throughput of the key isn't harmful to the performance of the feature; the benefit comes from latency improvements. Those are significant because reads caused by page faults for an image as it loads and initializes usually result in random seeks.
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And I gotta wonder how much more effective that's going to be. I mean sure it's reading faster due to the latency improvement, but really my XP prefetch folder is like 6MB. I can't imaging Vista being so much more. I'm skeptical of the real world benefits, but curious none the less. The guy in the link I posted seems to think it helped a lot of large memory systems (read "our" systems! :))
 
Flash memory just isnt that fast right now. But it might be soon.

Remember. Vista isnt meant to be a usuable OS now. It's the OS of tommorrow.
 
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