SSD's and Ramdrive questions

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Mon Sep 11, 2006 12:11 pm

I started a thread in this forum asking about non standard disk drive technologies that would significantly increase i/o performance like desktop application multitasking and quicker boot times into windows xp.

From the muckery of offtopic duscussion i came out with 2 alternatives, SSD's and Ramdrives (like the one from gigabyte). If there are others, please feel free to elaborate on them.

I dont really feel SSD's are for me at this time, basically because of the current price for them. I only need a 4gb drive for my windows and program files directories, but even drives this small with a sata connection are more than $500 everywhere i looked. While they do have increased performance over typical disk drives, it doesnt really appear to be that significant for the price increase.

Ramdrives, specifically the one from gigabyte, appear to be able to give me the performance i'm looking for in the size requirement that i need. Extreamly fast i/o performance, decreased boot times, up to 4gb of storage, less than $500, with a standard SATA connection.

My reasoning for looking for somthing like this is: I dont really use alot of disk space, around 30gb, so ive started switching my computers over from desktop drives to notebook drives. I've already noticed excessive lag with desktop application multitasking while i have a game (alt tab'd) running in the backgroun, and a notebook drive would only make this worse. So i want somthing to speed up my operating system and programs, while my notebook drive would be used for mass storage of my video games and mp3's. Also one of the reasons i switched to notebook drives was because of how quiet they are, so i need somthing that will be as quiet or better than a notebook drive, or the entire endevore is useless.

My entire windows directory and program files directory together is less than 4gb after a year of a windows install. So the drive doesnt need to be very big, just silent and very fast.

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To those that have an SSD or a ramdrive, can you tell me your experiences with them. How you used them, what types of complications you ran into, things of that nature.

Or mabey you know of some other storage technology other than these 2 that would meet my needs, if so please feel free to share.

highlandsun · Post by **highlandsun** » Mon Sep 11, 2006 2:28 pm

Well, a 40MB/sec 4GB CF card is around $320 here
http://www.memorysuppliers.com/sanulcomflas.html
and you can get fast CF to IDE adapters for around $20.

E.g. ACS Control or Mesanet CFADPT7

So, $340 and you're set.

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Mon Sep 11, 2006 4:53 pm

have you tried that setup highlandsun?

can you elaborate on your experience with it if so. what things did you notice were faster or slower, what worked and what didnt, complications etc etc.

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Mon Sep 11, 2006 5:25 pm

While CF cards have less problems with dieing after too much erase/write cycles, putting your main system drive with your swap file on it is still not a smart idea. (Unless you have a spare CF card and very regular backups.)

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Mon Sep 11, 2006 5:52 pm

see these are the things i need to know.

so a full install on flash memory wouldnt be a good idea? is that all flash memory or just the CF varients? cause i know ive seen companies like samsung trying to push flash varient 2.5" form factor drives with sata connections to replace current magnetic hard drives. I'd think if they had this type of issue, they wouldnt want to do that. mabey the technology their using on these new drives eliviates this problem, it would explain why a 4gb version is currently like 500-800 bucks, and a CF flash drive is less than half.

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Mon Sep 11, 2006 6:39 pm

well i've used my PC off a CF card but it was a)128MB and b)40x .. (ie, allegedly 6MB/s)
it was quite quick, but then firefox was the biggest app on there. the ultimate speed bottleneck for CF is that i think they all use PIO..whether or not that will restrict them @ 40MB/s or not i don't know..
as for the write limit, has anyone ever heard of a CF dying from this?.. personally i haven't, and i think its less significant than people make it out.. although, yes, i wouldn't run a swap on there even so; just get urself 2GB of RAM (maybe 1 will suffice for some people) and turn off the swap. if it won't go; make a little ramdisk (software, eg ramdisk.tk) and put the swapfile on there. i think they do write-leveling too to minimize the problem..
if u only have 4GB or so, it should be easy to back up, and many CFs come with either a lifetime or 5yr warranty, so if it breaks and its backed up, its not a big deal. also note it will fail gradually (ie, sector by sector) and not all at once, so even without backups you wouldn't likely loose much important data)
whatever low capacity ssd u might get, i'd look into nlite.
and avoid eBay if your looking for fast CFs (unless you're sure); there are many counterfeits, and u don't want to be screwed if u do want to use the warranty.
also bare in mind that the only thing CF>IDE adaptors do is make the pins smaller (+power), so don't pay a premium for a 'better' one (unless its form or something..)

"so a full install on flash memory wouldnt be a good idea? is that all flash memory or just the CF varients?" well most flash memory is specced for 100,000 writes (nice round figure smacks of the somewhat arbitrary to me); i'd guess the stuff they specifically sell as HDD replacements may be higher.

highlandsun · Post by **highlandsun** » Mon Sep 11, 2006 6:54 pm

Aris wrote:have you tried that setup highlandsun?

can you elaborate on your experience with it if so. what things did you notice were faster or slower, what worked and what didnt, complications etc etc.

Not yet. Actually I was considering a pair of 8GB CF cards
http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewto ... 508#286508
because I certainly need more than 4GB for my day to day use.

Wear leveling is pretty effective, but it helps to have excess capacity. I tend to fill my drive full and then go hunting for old files I can delete. If your disk is full, then the wear-leveling algorithms have nowhere to shuffle the data to.

re: paging files on CF - again, my laptop has 2GB of RAM so the paging file rarely gets used. I would probably just turn it off. But I think with sufficient free space, I'd just let the CF wear leveler do its job and not worry about it.

Given that Samsung just announced 32Gbit flash chips today, I'm going to hold off for a few more months to see what new products show up. 40MB/sec is good, but given that Samsung already has 108MB/sec read speeds with their OneNAND product line, I know that they can do better.

By the way, the CF-IDE adapters I pointed to are more than just dumb pin-conversions, they also support DMA mode, which the dumb adapters don't. That's important if you want to get anything faster than 16MB/sec out of them.

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Tue Sep 12, 2006 5:46 am

Not all flash is equal. (Don't ask me for the technical details.) Samsung is constantly improving on their flash technology, those presented SSD devices probably only use the latest of their flash chips. Wear levelling and bad block management also become more effective with bigger drives. Last but not least they only have to produce a product that lasts about 5 years of average use.

About the comment that with enough memory, the swap file isn't used: That's not how I have read that the Windows swap works. You would expect that the driver that manages swap would wait to write anything to disk until the real memory is almost full. It doesn't do that. It mostly looks at how long you haven't used something. If that time goes over a certain threshold, it gets swapped out. Since there is a lot of stuff you never use, that windows preloads into memory on boot....

frostedflakes · Post by **frostedflakes** » Tue Sep 12, 2006 9:08 am

I'm pretty sure I have read the same, there is no way to turn off the swap file for Windows. You can minimize the amount of space it uses, but never completely eliminate it.

So IMO, your best bet would be a large amount of memory and a swapfile on software RAMdisk drive. During average using (Firefox with a fair amount of tabs open, WMP running in background, etc.), my WinXP SP2 system with 2GB of memory uses ~400MB of RAM and ~300MB of swap. So with a decent amount of RAM (1-2GB) you should be load all cache to the memory. If you throw gaming into the equation, though, I am not completely sure, all the info in swap and RAM might be too much even for 2GB.

Aris · Post by **Aris** » Tue Sep 12, 2006 9:55 am

i wouldnt load games onto it, just the few programs i run and windows. all together its about 3gb worth of stuff leaving 1gb for swap if i went with a 4gb drive.

id just keep a notebook drive for mass storage for stuff like games and mp3's.

highlandsun · Post by **highlandsun** » Tue Sep 12, 2006 11:36 am

Tibors wrote:Not all flash is equal. (Don't ask me for the technical details.) Samsung is constantly improving on their flash technology, those presented SSD devices probably only use the latest of their flash chips. Wear levelling and bad block management also become more effective with bigger drives. Last but not least they only have to produce a product that lasts about 5 years of average use.

About the comment that with enough memory, the swap file isn't used: That's not how I have read that the Windows swap works. You would expect that the driver that manages swap would wait to write anything to disk until the real memory is almost full. It doesn't do that. It mostly looks at how long you haven't used something. If that time goes over a certain threshold, it gets swapped out. Since there is a lot of stuff you never use, that windows preloads into memory on boot....

All true. But I monitor how much of my swap space is in use, and it's not much, only a few tens of MB. Pretty sure I've got hundreds of MB of data in memory. You can turn off the paging file, but that only affects paged data, and relocated DLLs. Pages of program code will still be paged out when they go idle. Of course, that doesn't matter in this context because those pages don't need to be rewritten anywhere.

I still wish Windows had a smarter memory manager that didn't do any paging until it showed actual memory pressure, but I think there's some fundamental chicken'n'egg problem with the cache manager tied so intimately to the memory manager, that prevents them from fixing it.

And yes, clearly Samsung is at the forefront with flash technology, their previous generation 8Gbit parts have 40MB/sec read rates while most products you see out there are still down in the 5MB/sec range. The new stuff is obviously still pretty expensive too, given the high price of e.g. Sandisk Extreme IV 40MB/sec CF cards vs the run of the mill cards.

Copper · Post by **Copper** » Wed Sep 13, 2006 11:53 am

If you can run on 4 GB, then I think the i-RAM is the way to go in SSD. It's really fast. It's been dependable for me. I have the same OS install running for months now. No errors or data loss.

HammerSandwich · Post by **HammerSandwich** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 7:27 am

Sorry for coming late to the party.

Aris wrote:I've already noticed excessive lag with desktop application multitasking while i have a game (alt tab'd) running in the backgroun, and a notebook drive would only make this worse.

Aris, please tell us about your system's config and the programs which cause this. If you have only 512MB RAM, you should upgrade that before doing anything else.

Also, you can solve the paging file problem by moving it to your 2.5" drive. That's obviously slower, but sufficient memory will minimize its use.

HammerSandwich · Post by **HammerSandwich** » Sat Sep 16, 2006 7:56 am

Oops - I just read through your other thread and realize that my previous post wasn't what you wanted.

mb2 · Post by **mb2** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 8:10 am

Tibors wrote:About the comment that with enough memory, the swap file isn't used: That's not how I have read that the Windows swap works. You would expect that the driver that manages swap would wait to write anything to disk until the real memory is almost full. It doesn't do that. It mostly looks at how long you haven't used something. If that time goes over a certain threshold, it gets swapped out. Since there is a lot of stuff you never use, that windows preloads into memory on boot....

yes, windows is stupid.. but all u have to do is create a small ramdisk, and set the pagefile (mines 16MB) onto that ramdisk. problem solved. if u don't use much taxing stuff u could probably get by with 1gb too..

SSD's and Ramdrive questions

SSD's and Ramdrive questions

Re: SSD's and Ramdrive questions