How long would it take to load the entire Vista OS into ram from the hard drive?

[faxon]

hypothetical situation, since im not sure if i would even consider doing this since it would take like 10gb of RAM in vista, which wouldnt leave me much left over for my swap file and anything else going to the disk. with the price per gig of ram going down much faster than the average user can utilize, im considering setting up a (very large and fast) ramdisk with my next primary computer. what im curious to know is how long it would take to boot said system from either:

A: 2x400GB 7200.10 Barracaudas
B:2x150GB Velociraptors
C:2x73.5GB 15000RPM Fujitsu SAS drives

with nehalem being built around the structure of a server chip, i have seen at least 2 prototype motherboards for X58 that have the ability to run 2xSAS drives. raid is unconfirmed, but lets just assume it is for the sake of not arguing. one of the boards was the Foxxcon board seen here. from the looks of it i would have to use the stripe utility in vista, which isnt true raid in the strictest sense.

http://www.vr-zone.com/article...neak_Preview/6126.html

so, how long would it take to boot from something like that? could i just figure it by measuring the sustained data transfer rate of the stripe? i mention the 400GBx2 setup because i currently have 2 of those drives, and setting that up would cost me exactly $0, but the 150gb velociraptors are so cheap for their performance that its just so tempting, as are the 15000RPM SCSI drives

ed: this is the drive i have in mind for SAS config
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822116057

 

[Denithor]

Fixed linky

Speaking of the low cost of RAM, check these out.

EDIT: Sorry, link got pinched off there somehow. And here's more info I posted about these nifty drives.

 

[tommo123]

not a valid link

 

[faxon]

wouldnt that thing be severely limited by the data bandwidth of your SATA controller though? sure it would still be a hell of a lot faster than the fastest NAND Flash SSD, which would help with loading data into a ramdisk running directly off the motherboard, but is it really worth it even then? im pretty sure you would need a dedicated PCI-e X8 card to give something like that enough bandwidth, and at "2 drive" raid-0 it would still be limited by the bandwith of SATA2. would be a lot cheaper to just use SAS drives at this point, since you are going to sit around for a while waiting for everything to boot anyway.

 

[Denithor]

Probably not worth it, but a nifty toy nonetheless.

im pretty sure you would need a dedicated PCI-e X8 card to give something like that enough bandwidth

So why hasn't anyone come out with something like this yet? That's exactly what I've been thinking myself for the last few weeks while looking at this kind of technology--from these SATA RAMdrives to traditional RAMdisk to just fast spindle drives (velociraptor). The SSDs haven't quite saturated SATA bandwidth but within probably one or two more generations they'll be there. There's an obvious need for more bandwidth, both for SSDs and RAMdisks like these. Let's hope someone out there is paying attention and does something about it.

 

[faxon]

the people who designed the SATA spec got their SATA 6Gbit/s spec approved in august. it was designed specifically with the target audience of SSDs. its backwards compatible to SATA 3Gbit/s and should be shipping sometime next year. any drive with onboard DRAM cache that can support SATA 6Gbit/s will also be able to load the DRAM Cache at the new data transfer rate also, leading to increased small read/write performance on existing designs with a simple PCB upgrade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA_II

i actually just read up on that myself before posting, since i wanted to make sure what i was posting was acurate hehe

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: faxon
what im curious to know is how long it would take to boot said system from either:

A: 12.73 seconds
B: 11.39 seconds
C: 10.82 seconds

How the hell are we supposed to know? Tell me how long it will take to get the farts after my next bowl of chili.