Has anybody ever run a RAM drive larger than 1 GB? If so, what were your experiences?
Or, have you run a solid state hard drive?
My situation: I have a distributed network app that writes back results in packet form, resulting in fragmented drives. (picture 40 processes writing small amounts of 40 files, a bit at a time, rinse, repeat for a couple gig).
The apparent best solution is a RAM drive which I can periodically flush to the hard drive, solving not only write speed issues, but also fragmentation issues. Thus, I save wear and tear on my rather expensive SCSI array, and give the program itself a lot more speed to work with for the writes since memory is significantly faster. I have considered a caching SCSI RAID controller, but they are of limited use for constant, random writes at the speed and volume required.
The apps that I have found, such as RAMdiskNT appear to be viable solutions, but I'd love to have any feedback from people have have used them. I'll be testing it out myself as I can, so I'll try to post results here once our graphics people give me feedback and I get a machine set up with enough RAM to make it really worthwhile.
(and, unfortunately, small RAM drives need not apply: the scale and the usage are signifcantly different from keeping a /temp directory or a disk cache).
Thanks!
Z.
Or, have you run a solid state hard drive?
My situation: I have a distributed network app that writes back results in packet form, resulting in fragmented drives. (picture 40 processes writing small amounts of 40 files, a bit at a time, rinse, repeat for a couple gig).
The apparent best solution is a RAM drive which I can periodically flush to the hard drive, solving not only write speed issues, but also fragmentation issues. Thus, I save wear and tear on my rather expensive SCSI array, and give the program itself a lot more speed to work with for the writes since memory is significantly faster. I have considered a caching SCSI RAID controller, but they are of limited use for constant, random writes at the speed and volume required.
The apps that I have found, such as RAMdiskNT appear to be viable solutions, but I'd love to have any feedback from people have have used them. I'll be testing it out myself as I can, so I'll try to post results here once our graphics people give me feedback and I get a machine set up with enough RAM to make it really worthwhile.
(and, unfortunately, small RAM drives need not apply: the scale and the usage are signifcantly different from keeping a /temp directory or a disk cache).
Thanks!
Z.