Verrry Interesting SSD article..

Slutmonkey57b

PC Perspective have put up a decent medium-term look at life with an SSD. Looks like the pros of fast access times and constant read/write rates has a very very large bugbear in the room. The suggested fixes of large block rewrites don't inspire confidence either given the lifecycle of flash memory.

Given that my OS partition is only ~ 6 gigs I'm starting to wonder about the viability of upgrading to a large amount of RAM and loading the OS partition into ram on my next build. Worked in the very old days but have no idea how to go about it now.

uberpixie

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

PC Perspective have put up a decent medium-term look at life with an SSD. Looks like the pros of fast access times and constant read/write rates has a very very large bugbear in the room. The suggested fixes of large block rewrites don't inspire confidence either given the lifecycle of flash memory.

Given that my OS partition is only ~ 6 gigs I'm starting to wonder about the viability of upgrading to a large amount of RAM and loading the OS partition into ram on my next build. Worked in the very old days but have no idea how to go about it now.

Custompc had a few revies of ram drives a while back:
http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/244173/acard-ans-9010b.html#

This was the best bang for the buck model they could find. (there was a more expensive model from the same company)

"As a RAM drive, the ANS-9010B shuns non-volatile NAND flash memory in favour of traditional DRAM. DRAM is much faster than NAND flash, but it's volatile and loses its data when not powered. To minimise this problem, ACARD has fitted the ANS-9010B with a small battery, which keeps the DRAM powered long enough to automatically back up the data to a CompactFlash card (not supplied).

Inside the 5.25in drive are six DIMM sockets that can support up to 48GB of ECC or standard unbuffered DDR2 RAM. As such, the ANS-9010B is much cheaper to populate than the Hyperdrive4, the other RAM drive in this Labs test. For example, 12GB of Corsair XMS2-6400C5 will set you back £153.84 inc VAT compared with the £1,287.68 inc VAT it would cost to populate the Hyperdrive4 with 16GB of RAM.

Unlike the Hyperdrive4, the ANS-9010B upheld the RAM drive's honour, reading data at an incredible 175.2MB/sec and writing at an even more ludicrous 145MB/sec - nearly twice as fast as a hard disk.

The real-world benchmark numbers back up these amazing transfer rates too - the ANS-9010B achieved some of the fastest results in the multitasking and Crysis level loading tests. For example, the ANS-9010B was nearly 50 per cent faster at loading Crysis than the 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F1.
"

Where to buy such a beast is another story.

EDIT:http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product.jsp?idno_no=271&prod_no=ANS-9010B&type1_title=%20Solid%20State%20Drive&type1_idno=13

extra-ordinary_

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

PC Perspective have put up a decent medium-term look at life with an SSD. Looks like the pros of fast access times and constant read/write rates has a very very large bugbear in the room. The suggested fixes of large block rewrites don't inspire confidence either given the lifecycle of flash memory.

Given that my OS partition is only ~ 6 gigs I'm starting to wonder about the viability of upgrading to a large amount of RAM and loading the OS partition into ram on my next build. Worked in the very old days but have no idea how to go about it now.

Is there not a powering off problem with a RAM disk and how do you get around this - never powering off?

Found this: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/

uberpixie

extra-ordinary_ wrote: »

Is there not a powering off problem with a RAM disk and how do you get around this - never powering off?

have a look at the review above: for this particular model they have the ram battery backed which should allow you enough time to back your data up onto a Compact flash card which the drive will allow you to do.

In theory if you needed to shut the pc down for a while: back up data to CF card, turn off pc, turn pc back on : pull data from CF card back onto ram.

Usually most ram drives will have some form of battery to cover hort term power failures,other than that you are talking VERY regular backups to harddrive.

extra-ordinary_

Yeh I saw that review but it's probably even more expensive than a similar capacity SLC SSD although I saw there is also a cheaper $200 option.

I think the OP is talking about a virtual RAM drive as opposed to a physical device.

uberpixie

extra-ordinary_ wrote: »

Yeh I saw that review but it's probably even more expensive than a similar capacity SLC SSD although I saw there is also a cheaper $200 option.

I think the OP is talking about a virtual RAM drive as opposed to a physical device.

The only advantages to the ram drive listed is the performance and less isssues with fragmentation over ssds. Ram will long term take a lot more abuse and last longer.

The op may have been talking about a virtual ram drive: getting one to work as your OS drive would be "interesting" to say the least.

Slutmonkey57b

Nope, i'm talking about having a P45 board with 16GB of ram, and a standard mechanical disk as storage. On bootup, load the whole OS partition into RAM (say ~6 GB), then save it (changes and all) back to the harddrive partition at shutdown.

Slutmonkey57b

uberpixie wrote: »

Custompc had a few revies of ram drives a while back:
http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/244173/acard-ans-9010b.html#

Unlike the Hyperdrive4, the ANS-9010B upheld the RAM drive's honour, reading data at an incredible 175.2MB/sec and writing at an even more ludicrous 145MB/sec - nearly twice as fast as a hard disk.

To be honest, that's not terribly impressive max speeds for RAM on a 3gbs SATA link. I suppose what you're really trading for is latency and random access times though.

Solitaire

Review date: 1999. WTF?! :eek:

Can't believe how expensive RAMdrives still are. Those things shouldn't be anywhere near as expensive as the RAM that goes in them Still, SSDs really didn't help matters. I didn't really dig their hype, and I'm glad I didn't. They strike me as an evolutionary dead-end and given that any attempt to correct their flaws results in a significant reduction of their painfully short operating lifespans I don't see how SSDs can really progress without a significant change in the very nature of NAND-based flash memory.

And SM... I don't know if you already know it but there's a registry setting to (allegedly) force XP to leave loaded system/kernel processes in RAM and not just immediately dump them into the pagefile, which is the closest thing possible without running out and buying said RAMdrive. Try
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Control -> Session Manager -> Memory Management - DisablePagingExecutive (DWORD) = 1, save + reboot.
Not sure if it disables the swapfile completely, which isn't so hot. Nor do I have any idea what the analogous key is in Vista 64 either (if it even exists...)

Only problem I can think of is that if you use RAM-intensive programs (multimedia, design, encoding, games...) you'll be stealing from Peter to pay Paul with such a setup. Unless you get Vista Ultimate. And 16GB of fast DDR2/3. And that ain't cheap (nor is it a true RAMdrive!)