RAMdisks and possabilities

[BalAtWork]

Allright,

I was using the good ole Win98 save disk when I strted looking at how it works. It literally creates a drive on your RAM for ease of use. Well this is nce I thought. But also what could you REALLY do with that?

SO I want to know what some of you think of this idea....

If for say I had 3 Gigs of memory (some boards can do this fine). I could boot up with the disk and create a 2 gig ramdrive, immediatly ghost the entire windows system to the RAMdrive. Then start windows from the DOS promp on the RAMdrive. You could install a game directly to the RAMdrive and viola. You are now using a system with NO physical moving parts operating soley on a memory drive. Talk about removing all your bottle necks!!! FSB would become the most important factor.

WHat are the possabilties here? Games would fly, the system would rock, and the only thing that kills it is a power outage for whatever reason. You could set this whole process up to be a seamless boot everytime. With 3 gigs memory, that a gig for the system a gig for games and a gig of memory.


ANy thoughts? Someone give me some feedback!

Jon

 

[RSMemphis]

Yeah, ramdisks are quite useful.
There are some nice ramdisk programs for Win2K and WinXP out there...
I would not put the system on the ramdisk though, and with that much memory, I would also not move swappy there.

I would:

1) Load CD-ROM image files on there and use an emulator to use them like real CD-ROMs (when creating images properly so that they get the SD2 correct, this would work even for games)
2) Put MP3s on there
3) Any compilation should be done on a ramdisk as well
4) Install Games onto the ramdisk - write a script that copies everything back when you shutdown.

The problem for me so far - I am too lazy.

 

[CQuinn]

That would be a really, really bad idea.

The ramdrive.sys driver used on the Windows 9x/ME boot disks is only a 16-bit (real mode) driver.
The biggest drive that you can make with it is 32MB.

There are ramdisk utilities that can allocate more space, but they have to be running in a 32-bit protected mode
environment (Windows) in the first place.

Ghosting the entire drive to a RAM disk would take more time than it would to simply boot the OS from the Hard Drive
and load all your favorite apps at once at startup. If you had 3 Gigs of memory, then you would also be running an
OS (W2k or XP) that could actually make use of all that memory.

The biggest problem though is the idea that you could

<< Talk about removing all your bottle necks!!! >>


because that wouldn't remove any. While you would increase the access and transfer rates for the data,
it would also greatly increase the overhead on the CPU to both maintain the allocated memory used for the
RAM-Disk as a separate drive, and to transfer data from the virtual drive - into available ram - and then to
where-ever the data was supposed to go. Meaning that a significant amount of CPU power would be wasted
just handling data that would be better off being accessed from the hard drive it was originally stored on.
The majority of the data you use is only accessed once to load into memory. That also doesn't take into
account what would happen to disk-swapping when you've already taken more than half of the available
RAM away from the OS.

 

[Uuplaku]

On an interesting side note, at this year's CES a compan introduced a battery powered ramdrive that was meant for permanent storage.

Cost of this beastie: 1500$ for a gig.

 

[Whitedog]

BalAtWork - It's worderful people think outside of the box like that once in a while... but as CQuinn has said, it's not reality.

If you know how well modern operating systems work, you'd know you don't need a "ram drive" to get great performance from your PC.

You mention loading a game completely into RAM and it would run tons faster... well, if you have enough memory and a well coded game... they already do that.
I have a game called Gothic. When I load the game, it fills 230+ MB into memory for the "gothic.exe process" by itself. The game takes No time at all to load due to todays ultra fast hard drives.

Just put your faith in the computer scientists and "believe" they have todays computers running at optimal performance (for lack of a better phrase) and try to forget about the "ram drive" crap...

As Uupluka said, a Solid state Hard drive as a storage divice is the ultimate divice for storage, but they are by no means practical.

.02

 

[bravesfan258]

BalAtWork -

You can use a ramdrive on a laptop, which means no spinning HD, no moving parts, and much longer battery life.

 

[MWink]

Been there, done that, didn't work too well.

Back in the days of Win95 I made a 32MB ramdrive and copied Windows to it. It didn't really load/run much faster. I agree that it would take more time to copy all the data to the ramdrive than it would to run it from the HD. I have basically given up on ramdisks. They just don't seem too useful. I'll stick to a nice 7200RPM HD.

 

[BalAtWork]

I see what you guys are saying.

Cquin: I did not know the details of the ramdrive so that is educational. But if you look at the battery backed ramdrive for 1500 that Uuplaku mentioned, you see that it IS being done already. I was trying to "think outside the box" as put by Whitedog.

I understand the current system uses 16bit, or even 32 bit for other software. But I DO have to disagree with you on the statement that this is not needed. Keeping the information in the RAM would not occupy any CPU cycles to maintain the data there. As for todays parts being fast enough...BLAH That is never true as is evident by At100 AT 133 etc... coming out, heck by the fact a RAMdrive IS being made.


Your right Whitedog about the whole loading the .exe into the ram already for a game. Now imagine if that "Load" time however small it is now...was WAY less. That is what this provides. And as Cquin stated, YES there will be a longer Boot..BUT I would gladly take a 5 minute boot to have a computer run without ANY harddrive noise, seek times, etc.....

I guess they key is that this can be done NOW with some software to achieve the results of a 1500 dollar drive being made. Hell mostr of us have our computers on 24-7 anyhow. You would speed everything up, extend the life of your harddrive (less continuous work) and on top of it all, it WOULD provide improvement of some games if not ALL to some extant. Hell you could use a cheapass old Harddrive since its seektime is now only effecting bootspeed.

Whitedog, you said thinking outside the box was good, well DO IT THEN. Yea your Gothic Game is fast because it DOES EXACTLY WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. SO take it to the next level, EVERYTHING gos on the RAMdrive even games NOT so lucky to be optimized.

The possabilities are there, the tech is there, HELL the software is pretty much there, and the IMPROVEMENT is definantly there. Just imagine if that RAM could be powered 100% of the time if the MB was designed correctly, we would ALL be using RAM drives now! Quick boot if nothing else.

I would do it, but I know little about software.

 

[Whitedog]

<<And as Cquin stated, YES there will be a longer Boot..BUT I would gladly take a 5 minute boot to have a computer run without ANY harddrive noise, seek times, etc.....>>

Once my SCSI bios has finished detecting all devices, my PC takes 20 seconds to boot up. My Seagate Baracudu SCSI hard drive is so quiet, I cannot hear it over the CPU fan (It's that quiet). Gothic takes about 10 seconds to load the files from the hard drive and start the game.
Loading the files from disk to ram is only about 10% of load time when starting a game... the rest is CPU time.. I don't want you to think that if you had a 2 gig ram disk and had all your software on it that programs and games would start instantly, they wouldn't. The CPU still has to do a Hellofa lot of processing to start a game.

I've been out of this box (for lack of a better word) before. I was using a ramdrive way back in my Amiga days (for those who were lucky enough to have one would know what I'm talking about) and used it with 95 "some", but since it really hasn't developed much since then, it's pretty much old technology now a days to mess with.
Like these other guys have said, it's useless to try to do this with todays operating systems...

Let go of it man.

 

[dullard]

Ramdrives have always been useful. They were a long time ago and they still are now.

Old computers: My first computer (4.7 MHz or 7.7 MHz on Turbo) took 5 minutes to save my favorite games (mostly Sierra games). I'm not talking about loading a game, I'm not talking about loading a different level, I'm talkng about hitting the save game button. Then one day I discovered ramdrives (I had a whopping 256 kB of memory so there was lots to spare) and I was extremely grateful. The save games went from 5 minutes to 10 seconds! For those of you who don't like math, that is 30 times faster. There is nothing that I have ever seen since that provides even close to a 30x boost - nothing. When I was done playing the games, just copy the ramdrive contents to a physical disk and finished.

Current computers: I do scientific calculations. I solve roughly 1 million equations for 1 million variables at a time (sometimes less, sometimes more). Then I save the data (often 10 MB files) and repeat. For many calculations the time spent saving is often 50% of the total time required for a simulation (I use both SCSI and IDE drives - it doesn't matter which one since access time is unimportant for large files). Then I analyze the data and delete the unimportant ones. Solution: use a ramdrive instead of these slow HDs. Simulations instantly become 50% faster. Then I analyze the data, and save the important ones. When you already have top-of-the-line workstations/beowolf cluster, a 50% speed boost is impossible any other way.

So ramdrives can be very useful.

However, there is no reason to put the OS on the ramdrive since you rarely access the OS files except for an occasional reboot. As already mentioned copying a game to the ramdrive won't be of much benefit unless you repeatedly quit and reload the game (Such as with Civ3 when you want to cheat and have different battle/hut results...) Using a Ramdrive to save/load temporary application data is where you see great boosts.

 

[Lorne]

There are good Dynamic ramdrive software out there that runs under 98, Dont know how well they work under XP if at all But I had one set up for a simple conversions I was doing but didnt have the ram to really support the Pagefile, you can even set max limits and when its going to excede it it pages to the drive.
There is no reason to use it to put your pagefile on, If you set the ConservativePagefile setting system.ini you save more space and speed.

 

[Ardeeell]

superspeed software apparently has ramdisk software...current issue PC Magazine has review...10X faster than 7200 rpm HD...compat with xp nt 2000.

 

[Cenarius]

SuperSpeed Software

 

[CQuinn]

BalAtWork, you are still missing some information.



<< Cquin: I did not know the details of the ramdrive so that is educational.
But if you look at the battery backed ramdrive for 1500 that Uuplaku mentioned,
you see that it IS being done already.

<<

It has "been done" for years, there were battery backed ramdrives around
back when a 50Mhz 486 was considered a blazingly fast machine.
Those drives cost about 10x as much then, so the prices have come down,
but for the same amount of money you could buy a kickass SCSI controller
and Seventy-Five times as much storage in 15000rpm drives.



<< I understand the current system uses 16bit, or even 32 bit for other software.
But I DO have to disagree with you on the statement that this is not needed. >>



I never said it was not needed, Hell I'd love to have a cheap Solid-State Hard
Drive to boot my system from. They should have been building that technology
into motherboards as far back as 1995. But (not a slam)
the way you would try to put a RAM-drive together does come across as a bad idea.



<< Keeping the information in the RAM would not occupy any CPU cycles to maintain
the data there. >>



That would be true if it was DATA but a RAM drive is used as
STORAGE which opens up a different set of issues. For it to work
right, the OS has to use the Ramdrive.sys driver as the interface between
it and the data it is looking for; in much the same way that internal
support for SCSI, USB, Firewire and even IDE comes about thru a custom
driver for the OS. But in this case when a data request is passed thru
the driver, to the controller, and then to the drive itself; what is
really happening is that the CPU is forced into double duty both as the
messanger of the data request, and as the controller to pass commands
on to the device itself. You would be getting a similar effect as if
you had turned off DMA for your IDE devices, the CPU would have no
other device that it could pass some of the workload on to.
Add to that the hundreds of background requests that an OS like Windows
makes to the filesystem just to make sure files it might need are
around, and you start to get a picture of how much overhead you put
on the CPU, when it could probably be more efficiently used to boost
your 3dbench scores.

Solid-State drives or "RAM-Disk on a card" solutions also come with
their own controllers, or are usually built as SCSI devices to avoid that
exact problem above.



<< As for todays parts being fast enough...BLAH That is never
true as is evident by At100 AT 133 etc... coming out, heck by the fact a
RAMdrive IS being made. >>



ATA-133 was more to break the 128Gig barrier than to boost speed.
The only time dedicated RAM-Drives or Solid-State drives have useful
is when it saves or makes a company more money to use such a device
than it costs them to buy and install them in the first place.
And even then, the drives are uses as caching buffers for larger
hard drive arrays, or to provide fast turnaround for mission critical
installations.

Whitedogs point is that it is more efficient to use the majority of
your memory as RAM, and not cripple your system by taking away from
the OS its primary resource.



<< BUT I would gladly take a 5 minute boot to have a computer run without ANY
harddrive noise, seek times, etc.....

<<

I'm willing to bet your system has more than 2Gigs of hard drive space on it.
So you'd use 5 min to boot, have 1 pure minute of quiet, and then go back to
the harddrive noise, seek times, etc. to get acesss to the rest of your stuff.

I'll take my under one minute boot time, along with the 100+ Gig of drives
that I can hardly hear over the sound of my fans, and try to save my money for
the DVD burner I want, or even wait for the day when holographic storage
comes along to give me the best of both worlds.



<< I guess they key is that this can be done NOW with some software to achieve
the results of a 1500 dollar drive being made. >>



Nope, nice to think so, but there is a reason those cards still cost
several times the value of the memory built onto them.



<< Whitedog, you said thinking outside the box was good, well DO IT THEN. >>



I'll throw that one back in your court, and ask you to consider factors beyond
just the speed of RAM vs that of the Hard drive.



<< Just imagine if that RAM could be powered 100% of the time if the MB was
designed correctly, we would ALL be using RAM drives now!

<<

Would we? Based on what? DRAM? EDO? SDRAM? RAMBUS? DDR?
Every few years when the idea comes up, somebody comes up with a whole new
type of RAM to build the motherboards around, and they all get re-designed
to accomodate it.