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Is this true about Vista?

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Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Originally posted by: andy04
Ok, anyways... it doesnt make sence at all bcoz RAMs have effective speed of 1.5 - 2 GBps and a HDD or Flash cannot even come anywhere near it... so it defeats the purpose of RAM.
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You're the idiot from the other board, aren't you.

And why the hell would you bold the period at the end of the sentence? 😕

- M4H
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Shut the F*** up dude whats your problem... read the 1st post it says "ram". ram and swap file are not the same thing. its confusing. IDIOT
 
Originally posted by: BD2003
Originally posted by: andy04
Originally posted by: loup garou
Originally posted by: andy04
Ok, anyways... it doesnt make sence at all bcoz RAMs have effective speed of 1.5 - 2 GBps and a HDD or Flash cannot even come anywhere near it... so it defeats the purpose of RAM.
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Dude...just...argh....forget it.
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Ok I read the Wikipidia article and now I understand that Vista is trying to put the swap file on the Flash not the "RAM" thing. Now this makes lot of sence. It now my fault Wise A**. Its just that the original post is misleading...
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From your sentence, its pretty plain and clear that you still completely misunderstand it.
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so will your majesty be so gracious to enlighten my dumb a**

 
Originally posted by: andy04
wait wait wait wait...

isnt a flash mem slow as sh1t compared to HDD... Then why not use HDD as ram...

Sounds incredibely stupid to me
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From the OS forum.

Readyboost - Another feature I was skeptical of - but it works. Very well. There seems to be some confusion as to what it is. Some say its a disk cache. Some say its virtual memory. In reality, its both and then a little bit more. I got a 2gb OCZ drive in there.

In normal app usage, the amount of disk thrashing has gone down to pretty much zero. I rarely if ever heard the drive really kick in unless I'm loading something huge, or something that I rarely access. Flash is cheap, random access is ten times faster than a hard disk, and for the 20 bucks a 1-2gb drive would cost, there is absolutely no reason not to use it.

So if superfetch doesnt happen to have what you need, the readyboost cache likely does - and it'll almost always be faster than hitting the disk. Boots and wakeups are at least twice as fast with the cache, even though I rarely do either. For laptops with low memory, it will be a godsend.

But I wanted to really push both these features, so I loaded up oblivion. The game itself takes up massive amounts of ram. Running around the world forces loads of pretty much entirely random parts of the game.

Without the readyboost cache in, with 1gb of ram, it performed similarly to XP. Always had to hit the disk to load things, even if you just were there. Quitting the game and going back to the desktop resulted in a good 30-60 seconds of thrashing just to get things loaded back into memory. The game just demands so much memory that windows HAS to forsake everything else for it.

I formatted the USB stick, and made a new, clean cache. Popped the stick in.

1st load - I expected it to load at the same rate, but I was wrong - even with an empty cache, it was faster. I suppose it was a lot easier for it to write off to the flash drive to clear needed memory, than it was to hit the disk while simultaneously trying to load the game off the disk.

Walking around, it was a lot snappier than usual. Walking into new areas was sped up a bit, walking back to old areas was sped up a LOT. 1GB is barely enough for this game, but it felt like a lot more was in there with the cache. Not quite the same as having more RAM, but much better than hitting the page file.

Quit the game, and it reloaded the desktop also a hell of a lot faster. I then went out of my way to load just about every other app I had on the system, well over 1gb of stuff, and waited a good 15 mins, to make sure as little as possible of oblivion remained in the RAM cache, but should still be in the readyboost.

Reloading was then quite a bit faster, and the best part - walking to areas that I previously been to on the previous load was still accelerated...very cool stuff. Made the game a lot more playable.

When they come out with the internal, PCI express caches, I'm sure it'll be an even bigger difference.
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The first few hours did seem a little more sluggish than it's been recently. It had to build up the index, which didnt take very long, and the low priority IO did seem to manage it a bit well. Havent seen the indexer come on in days now that it's finished it's initial run. And now that superfetch has an idea of what apps I use most, they always seem to be ready and waiting.

It seems to use a bit more memory than XP (maybe 100mb more or so), but thats fairly inconsequential since it manages it a hell of a lot better, and a $20 flash drive goes a long way towards making that difference up. I wouldn't hesitate to put it on 1gb system, and as long as you have a readyboost cache of at least 1gb, I probably wouldnt hesitate to put it on a 512mb system...but I havent tried so I cant say for sure.
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Originally posted by: andy04
wait wait wait wait...

isnt a flash mem slow as sh1t compared to HDD... Then why not use HDD as ram...

Sounds incredibely stupid to me
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seek times are much faster on flash memory though, most stuff in ram is a bunch of little things not large files.
 
Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Originally posted by: michaels
On another board I post at, a guy is claiming memory sticks can be used as ram. Here is the exact quote..
in vista which i think is cool is that you can use stick drives as ram!!! that means you dont have to up grade a mother board u can have like 1 gig off a stick drive
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Ask him how he plans to use Vista without a Shift key.

Link to board in question so we can have a midday forum invasion, please. 😛

- M4H
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I fully support this measure :thumbsup:
 
Originally posted by: ryan256
Originally posted by: andy04
isnt a flash mem slow as sh1t compared to HDD... Then why not use HDD as ram...
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Yes it is... and yes its stupid. A seperate 20GB HDD off of eBay for use as extra paging/memory would be faster and cheaper than a 2GB usb flash memory.
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What you said is true for linear transfer rate.

HOWEVER, page file IO is almost 100% random.

In order to do random IO, hard drives need to do a seek to wherever the random data is located on the disk. Since we're talking about 100% random IO, basically the hard drive is seeking probably 99% of the time, and reading/writing the other 1% of the time. That scenario SIGNIFICANTLY slows down the actual observed transfer rate to/from the drive.

In contrast, flash memory has instantaneous "seeks" (as there is no mechanical arm to move into the correct place), and therefore can be reading/writing 99% of the time and "seeking" 1% of the time.


 
Originally posted by: andy04
wait wait wait wait...

isnt a flash mem slow as sh1t compared to HDD... Then why not use HDD as ram...

Sounds incredibely stupid to me
Click to expand...

Files can be accessed much faster off flash drives than HDDs, so vista uses the flash drive for small and medium sized cache files and the hdd for large ones.
 
Originally posted by: michaels
Where do I go to change virtual memory on my pc?
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System Properties, Advance, Perfomance. Click on Settings. You will see Virtual Memory at the bottom of the Performance Options box.

 
It's not virtual memory. It's the size of the swap file.

Virtual memory is something you can't change. Sorry to be anal about this, but it's very irritating that something so basicly fundamental as virtual memory is so abused.

Whoever in Microsoft thought it was a good idea to label that 'Virtual Memory' should be dragged out into the street and horsewiped.

It's as if I was trying to sell you a 1997 ford pickup for 2500 dollar to you and you buy it. Then you show up to pick it up and all it was is the exhaust muffler from a 1997 ford pickup.
 
Originally posted by: drag
It's not virtual memory. It's the size of the swap file.

Virtual memory is something you can't change. Sorry to be anal about this, but it's very irritating that something so basicly fundamental as virtual memory is so abused.

Whoever in Microsoft thought it was a good idea to label that 'Virtual Memory' should be dragged out into the street and horsewiped.

It's as if I was trying to sell you a 1997 ford pickup for 2500 dollar to you and you buy it. Then you show up to pick it up and all it was is the exhaust muffler from a 1997 ford pickup.
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Although youre right about virtual memory, youre also right about being anal. 😛
 
Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
Originally posted by: andy04
ram and swap file are not the same thing. its confusing to an IDIOT like me
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I agree 😛

- M4H
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sorry about your mama last night... about her a... anyways... thats wasnt an excuse enough to change the quote from my post you duma**
 
Originally posted by: loup garou
Originally posted by: andy04
Ok, anyways... it doesnt make sence at all bcoz RAMs have effective speed of 1.5 - 2 GBps and a HDD or Flash cannot even come anywhere near it... so it defeats the purpose of RAM.
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Dude...just...argh....forget it.
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upping your post count again huh? maybe you should think before you post.
 
Originally posted by: michaels
On another board I post at, a guy is claiming memory sticks can be used as ram. Here is the exact quote..
in vista which i think is cool is that you can use stick drives as ram!!! that means you dont have to up grade a mother board u can have like 1 gig off a stick drive
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

This thread might have had a good discussion if there hadn't been so many things said wrong in this post.

Oh well, maybe I'll use my flash drive so that I don't have to upgrade my motherboard. lol
 
anyone knows a good way or benchmark to actually test this?? I do think a fast flashdrive might help a little since seek time are 0.00sec compare to a harddisk swapfile.

 
Originally posted by: harpy82
anyone knows a good way or benchmark to actually test this?? I do think a fast flashdrive might help a little since seek time are 0.00sec compare to a harddisk swapfile.
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It's very, very difficult to benchmark.

You can't just run a test, pop the stick in and run it again, since it's fairly useless until things have been cached on it.

The persistent memory cache also complicates things a great deal, since you'd have to flush that cache out, or else the ram disk cache will obviously blow away the flash disk.

I kept on eye on it with perfmon, and it doesnt do much when you're not running low on memory...there's little swapping, and you have a decent ram disk cache which is clearly your first choice.

Any benchmarks I've found on the net miss these points entirely, and write it off as useless. Maybe if I have some free time later today, I'll run a few of my own.

I did see major activity when I was loading games and such - things that really tax your memory so you're not only low on program memory, but have a tiny ram disk cache. This is why its so commonly understood as a replacement for memory - even though its just a disk cache, it really provides it's main benefit under low memory situations.

So if you have 2gb of memory or so, and rarely fill it, and are expecting a significant boost, you're not going to find it.
 
Originally posted by: BD2003
Originally posted by: harpy82
anyone knows a good way or benchmark to actually test this?? I do think a fast flashdrive might help a little since seek time are 0.00sec compare to a harddisk swapfile.
Click to expand...

It's very, very difficult to benchmark.

You can't just run a test, pop the stick in and run it again, since it's fairly useless until things have been cached on it.

The persistent memory cache also complicates things a great deal, since you'd have to flush that cache out, or else the ram disk cache will obviously blow away the flash disk.

I kept on eye on it with perfmon, and it doesnt do much when you're not running low on memory...there's little swapping, and you have a decent ram disk cache which is clearly your first choice.

Any benchmarks I've found on the net miss these points entirely, and write it off as useless. Maybe if I have some free time later today, I'll run a few of my own.

I did see major activity when I was loading games and such - things that really tax your memory so you're not only low on program memory, but have a tiny ram disk cache. This is why its so commonly understood as a replacement for memory - even though its just a disk cache, it really provides it's main benefit under low memory situations.

So if you have 2gb of memory or so, and rarely fill it, and are expecting a significant boost, you're not going to find it.
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Another thing that will impact the benchmark i think will be the simultaneous use of an external USB HDD... Just a thought... (no need to get anal if i am wrong... ppl in this thread have been acting pretty weird...)
 
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