How would a 15k SCSI drive compare to a ramdisk drive?

[tommo123]

3 gigs? how do some people have 4 gigs in there?

did xp handle more than 3 gigs pre sp2?

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: tommo123
3 gigs? how do some people have 4 gigs in there?

did xp handle more than 3 gigs pre sp2?

Yup, but M$ disabled the fourth gig as their answer to the security problems 3.5gb+ had 😛

 

[tommo123]

wow. annoying. have you got any links to this info? why would 4 gigs of ram be a security problem?

guess i'll have to go back to SP1

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: tommo123
wow. annoying. have you got any links to this info? why would 4 gigs of ram be a security problem?

guess i'll have to go back to SP1

The history of the whole thing seems pretty murky. From what I can tell, Windows XP previously only liked to see 3.5gb out of 4gb of ram, reserving the last half a gig for the PCI bus. I remember seeing a software fix of some kind for that. Then SP2 came out and completely cut out support for 4gb, or so I've heard. My laptop only supports 2gb, but I want to jump to a desktop later this year. One trick that I've read about today (twice) is turning off the page file to access all of the ram. So, from what I've read and heard from people who have run large amounts of ram, XP SP2 does not recognize more than 3 gigs of physical memory. Here are some links to get you started:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/888137/en-us
http://phorums.com.au/archive/index.php/t-162772-p-1.html
http://bink.nu/forums/8805/ShowPost.aspx

Another thing I wonder about is how much ram you can have per processor...can XP support 8gb ram with dual procs? Even with a single proc, it'd be real nice to set aside 2 of the 4gb ram for a virtual ramdisk. I get roughly 500MB/s with my current ramdisk (Adobe Reader installed on it = instant on when loading PDFs in Firefox!).

If anyone can clear this issue up for us, it would be most appreciated!

 

[imported_Tick]

1)Buy dual-socket rig, populate with 8 1GB dimms
2)Get XP x64
3)Partition 5GB as RAM drive
4)...
5)Profit!

 

[tommo123]

will check those links out. thanks 🙂

really want to have 4 gigs and just have 2 gigs for the swap file. that would beat an i-ram easy!

 

[Kaido]

Makes me wish there was an SATA 3.0 spec available...Sisoft's Sandra rates the SATA 1.0 (150MB/s max) Gigabyte i-ram at 132MB/s. SATA II is supposed to be 300MB/s, but I'm getting close to 500MB/s (more, in some tests) with my virtual ram disk drive. Even when the i-ram is released in SATA II spec, it still won't match up to its potential (plus it can use ddr400 vs. the ddr333 in my system, so maybe even faster!). Nevertheless, it should be exceedingly quick as a boot/apps/files drive 😀

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: tommo123
will check those links out. thanks 🙂

really want to have 4 gigs and just have 2 gigs for the swap file. that would beat an i-ram easy!

Allocating part of your memory as "swap" is pointless. Then you are paying all the extra overhead of managing a swap file, plus the overhead of emulating a hard disk in memory, just to access part of your RAM. Just let Windows use it as cache; it'll probably do a better job.

Another thing I wonder about is how much ram you can have per processor...can XP support 8gb ram with dual procs? Even with a single proc, it'd be real nice to set aside 2 of the 4gb ram for a virtual ramdisk.

The amount of visible RAM is independent of the number of CPUs.

So, from what I've read and heard from people who have run large amounts of ram, XP SP2 does not recognize more than 3 gigs of physical memory.

Something like that. It's certainly limited to ~3.5GB at best. Use Windows Server 2003 or the 64-bit version of WinXP (with a 64-bit CPU) if you really need 4+GB of RAM.

 

[tommo123]

i would love to go to xp64, but there's limited support for it and a lot of the software i use for video enc isnt working on it yet. vista64 will be the one i think

 

[Kaido]

Hmm I've noticed with RamDiskXP that seemingly poorly-written programs have issues with it. Most apps run okay, but HDTach and HL2, for example, get memory allocation errors when loading, so I can't run a virtual ramdisk at the same time. Most other programs work fine though.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: Kaido
Hehe, SiSoftware Sandra just rated my ramdisk at 498MB/s 😀 I'm using Cenatek's RamDiskXP software to partition my system ram (2gb total, 300 megs for a ramdisk). Here's the scores:

Kaido's 300mb ddr333 ramdisk: 498MB/s
SATA150 3.5" 4xRaid0 (36GB, 10Krpm, 8MB cache) WD Raptor: 144MB/s
SATA150 (Gigabyte iRAM) (4GB): 132MB/s
SCSI U320 3.5" 2xRaid0 (73GB, 15Krpm, 8MB cache) Maxtor Atlas IV: 115MB/s
SATA150 3.5" 2xRaid0 (36GB, 10Krpm, 8MB cache) WD Raptor: 95MB/s

Kaido for teh win! 😉

Of course, your RAM is connected to the SATA controller, isn't it? :roll:

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Phil

Originally posted by: Kaido
Hehe, SiSoftware Sandra just rated my ramdisk at 498MB/s 😀 I'm using Cenatek's RamDiskXP software to partition my system ram (2gb total, 300 megs for a ramdisk). Here's the scores:

Kaido's 300mb ddr333 ramdisk: 498MB/s
SATA150 3.5" 4xRaid0 (36GB, 10Krpm, 8MB cache) WD Raptor: 144MB/s
SATA150 (Gigabyte iRAM) (4GB): 132MB/s
SCSI U320 3.5" 2xRaid0 (73GB, 15Krpm, 8MB cache) Maxtor Atlas IV: 115MB/s
SATA150 3.5" 2xRaid0 (36GB, 10Krpm, 8MB cache) WD Raptor: 95MB/s

Kaido for teh win! 😉

Of course, your RAM is connected to the SATA controller, isn't it? :roll:

My ram is connected to the system; the virtual ramdisk software I'm using cuts out a chunk of system ram (2gb - 300 megs). The Gigabyte i-ram is connected by SATA, yes, but I'm not using that yet. No way I could get nearly 500MB/s on SATA 😉