Microdrives: a solution?

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Sat Feb 14, 2009 8:40 am

I have been thinking about this for long and I maybe have a viable solution regarding regular storage, swap space and system drives. Not to come up with any confusion I made a quick research and it seems that most modern ATX motherboards still offer at least a single IDE interface (most likely for legacy CD/DVD drive, but HDDs are also supported). I started tihnking a bit and I am starting to like this idea I came up with. So without any further bulls**t this is my idea cut down to three points:

1) Operating system in a small SSD (8GB or less is great for most Windows XP or Linux installations).
2) Swap space / pagefile in a single Microdrive (2GB/4GB is enough for most configurations).
3) Personal file storage in an external 5400RPM HDD (a Western Digital Green Power sounds awesome).

Most of the time the user will load applications and work within the operating system and a very quick access time is key to quick loading times and fast operation. SSDs can offer this, but they have a limitation of write cycles so a Microdrive will jump in to function as swap space / pagefile and so the operating system does not need any extra modification and can preserve the existence of the swap space / pagefile. Personal storage is always required and for example I have just a bit more than 120GB personal files and stuff. I assume everyone needs loads of storage and so a 5400RPM HDD in an external enclosure is the best, because it is fast enough and doesn't cost much and finally won't get on your nerves with noise. SSDs are too costly to get one with enough space for both the operating system and personal storage so splitting these into two is the best solution. Also the Microdrive will come in handy in case you need to use your external HDD somewhere else but still need to use your PC (as in the swap space / pagefile isn't tied to the external HDD).

I am just not sure whether a Microdrive will cut it. They are in practice silent which is a good plus and they have a native IDE interface so no circuits are needed to make them usable, but most Microdrives I've seen are 3600RPM, is this enough for swap space / pagefile usage? Does the swap space / pagefile need quick access? If yes then how quick? Will a Microdrive cut it?

Thanks in advance!

Mr Evil · Post by **Mr Evil** » Sat Feb 14, 2009 10:41 am

Go without a pagefile. If you have 4GB and a 32bit OS then you almost certainly will never need one.

lowpowercomputing · Post by **lowpowercomputing** » Sat Feb 14, 2009 12:17 pm

Original IBM Microdrive, 1 GB:

Code: Select all

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=100M.img bs=1024k count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes transferred in 51.348730 secs (2042068 bytes/sec)

So, write speed is 2 MB/s (USB reader, FAT16). I suppose read speeds will be somewhere between 4 and 6 MB/s (Wikipedia says so).

Not really worth it IMO. Besides, Microdrives spin down when they're idle for some seconds (I can clearly hear mine doing that) so if using one for a swapfile the OS would always have to wait for it to spin up before it can access the file. I can see this issue making accessing swap very sluggish.

So, I'd rather do what Mr Evil said: Get as much RAM as you can so you won't need a swapfile.

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Sat Feb 14, 2009 1:00 pm

I have a 64-bit OS and 2GB RAM... but default Linux installations insist on putting up some swap space (usually between 1GB~2GB). Should I just go without any swap space? Oh and didn't know Microdrives were that slow

Mr Evil · Post by **Mr Evil** » Sat Feb 14, 2009 1:28 pm

With a 64bit OS and only 2GB you might not be able to get away with no swap. Even if you never actually use more than 2GB in total, you may lose performance from not having as much spare for disc cache. RAM is really cheap now, so buy more. Lots more.

Plekto · Post by **Plekto** » Sat Feb 14, 2009 1:54 pm

Battery backed ramdisk with nothing on it but the OS - literally. Keep the Apps directory and everything else on the main hard drive or SSD.

8GB should be enough for just the OS and swap files.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/sho ... p?t=215670
The One to get is the ANS-9010B, which is single channel SATA2 and lower cost. Drop in any used DDR2 memory. Turn on the ECC function(eats some space but does error correction on the fly). Load in a 16GB or so CF card into the backup slot.

There's a backup and restore button as well to do it manually if you like. Press it once a week and enjoy. Never degrades, never slows down, never needs to be defragged, almost never dies(when was the last time you saw non-overclocked ram die of actual old age??).

Backup and OS solution all in one 0db package. But it's critical that you move everything large and keep it off of the main OS drive. There isn't space and you want a quick reinstall capability if you have to. (pretty much the just OS, swap file, and documents and settings folder)

Note - If you do run any sort of ramdisk, turn off write caching on the thing - it's meaningless and just adds clock cycles.

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Sun Feb 15, 2009 1:19 am

Mr Evil wrote:With a 64bit OS and only 2GB you might not be able to get away with no swap. Even if you never actually use more than 2GB in total, you may lose performance from not having as much spare for disc cache. RAM is really cheap now, so buy more. Lots more.

Are you sure I am going to lose performance? The RAM I use is Kingston HyperX 1066Mhz CL5 DDR2. Also I am going to get back to 32-bit (incompatibilities with audio stuff). When in 32-bit is 2GB enough?

Mr Evil · Post by **Mr Evil** » Sun Feb 15, 2009 6:24 am

LodeHacker wrote:Are you sure I am going to lose performance? The RAM I use is Kingston HyperX 1066Mhz CL5 DDR2. Also I am going to get back to 32-bit (incompatibilities with audio stuff). When in 32-bit is 2GB enough?

Almost certainly. Disc cache makes a big difference to performance (easily noticeable by how quickly an application launches the second time compared to the first time). Every time you use a lot of RAM for something, the disc cache will be lost and you'll have to load it all from the HD again next time. And then of course if you use more than 2GB, things will go horribly wrong.

Try it if you want to be sure.

Plekto · Post by **Plekto** » Sun Feb 15, 2009 12:51 pm

Windows is still limited to 2-3GB(depending on whether you hack the registry) per process. So more than that is only useful if you're running lots of big things at once.

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Sun Feb 15, 2009 2:23 pm

Mr Evil I'm starting to get afraid because the PC is in audio production use and quite often I have projects open with many instances of synthesizers, tracks and EQ filters that when looking at process manager it says my DAW application is using 788~804MB of RAM. Largest project ever I worked with used exactly 1682MB of RAM. I remember it exactly because the PC would slowdown significantly while rendering the project. At any case these projects which I work with quite often are open for at least 4 hours as that is my standard session length. I noticed extreme improvement when moving to 1066Mhz HyperX from the earlier 667Mhz ValueRAM. Also I had 1.5GB before and now with 2GB I do notice more smoothness while working on more demanding projects for long. Tell me how can I make this better? Like I said I'll be going back to 32-bit so it's impossible to use 4GB RAM. Thanks in advance!

ACook · Post by **ACook** » Sun Feb 15, 2009 2:30 pm

32bit will work with 4GB fine, it just won't see all of it.

onboard gfx will take some, and if you have onboard but just use a discrete gfx, it will take even more (780G+3450 512MB means windows only sees 3GB) - but it will work just fine.

Mr Evil · Post by **Mr Evil** » Sun Feb 15, 2009 3:10 pm

Even if you get a performance improvement from fast RAM, you will very likely get better performance from more, but slower RAM, due to the reduction in use of ultra-slow swap.

So, my advice would be to get another 2GB of whatever you can afford. This will give you 3-4GB useable RAM. I seem to recall that you can change the "swapiness" in Linux so that it won't use the swapfile until RAM runs out, so change it to do that but keep the swapfile just in case (you can't do that in Windows so you have to turn it off completely to stop it from being used all the time).

Plekto · Post by **Plekto** » Sun Feb 15, 2009 10:16 pm

Ah - this was my problem as well.

How do you get past 3.25GB in Windows? You have to give it a huge swapfile. But this has to be in memory as well, which then allows it to go past the 4GB barrier via swapping and caching.

The problem is of course, virtual memory/swap is very very slow. So you would need a few GB of physical RAM running as a dedicated drive that the swap is on. If your SATA bus is fast enough, it should run at nearly the same speed as the RAM and be nearly invisible.

There is another dirty trick that you can use, but Windows 32 bit OSes have it disabled - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

This switch enables the CPU to address up to 64GB of memory internally. The lower 4GB is set to 3.25 or so and the rest is system-reserved address space. Above that is normally usable. Microsoft has it disabled in order to force people to buy their 64 bit OSes.

Windows Server 2003 R2 has it enabled. That's as close as it gets with a 32 bit OS - though that may not be 100% compatible as well.

QuietOC · Post by **QuietOC** » Mon Feb 16, 2009 6:48 am

Plekto wrote:There is another dirty trick that you can use, but Windows 32 bit OSes have it disabled - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension

This switch enables the CPU to address up to 64GB of memory internally. The lower 4GB is set to 3.25 or so and the rest is system-reserved address space. Above that is normally usable. Microsoft has it disabled in order to force people to buy their 64 bit OSes.

Windows Server 2003 R2 has it enabled. That's as close as it gets with a 32 bit OS - though that may not be 100% compatible as well.

PAE is actually normally enabled in 32-bit Windows--at least if you have a CPU with the NX-bit which is nearly all of the recent ones. Microsoft has not allowed 4GB memory access, but that was probably due to hardware that only does 32-bit DMA. Any hardware that works in x64 should also allow >4GB in a 32-bit OS using PAE.

Apple's OSX has a 32-bit kernel and has no trouble accessing 4GB and more of memory using PAE mode, but they don't need to worry about supporting crappy 32-bit DMA hardware either.

LodeHacker · Post by **LodeHacker** » Mon Feb 16, 2009 12:46 pm

Can you check a quick thing for me? Here's the Qualified Vendor List for memory modules for my motherboard: http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/soc ... Memory.pdf

I currently use this RAM from Kingston: KHX8500D2K2/2GN. According to the QVL it is not possible to have "four modules inserted into both the yellow slots and the black slots as two pairs of Dual-channel memory configuration". Should I be worried? Will the RAM not work or what? Thanks in advance!

Plekto · Post by **Plekto** » Mon Feb 16, 2009 2:43 pm

QuietOC wrote: Microsoft has not allowed 4GB memory access, but that was probably due to hardware that only does 32-bit DMA. Any hardware that works in x64 should also allow >4GB in a 32-bit OS using PAE.

It *should*, but it's 1000% disabled and with no way to get around it in 32 bit Windows. All other OSes can use PAE and 32 bit OSes just fine by now. Obvious marketing decision by Microsoft. And yet another reason they suck.