Windows Virtual Memory on a memory stick

[girlpower4ever]

I'm planning to conduct intensive tests to see how well a memory 2 gigabyte sd stick with 10 mb pers second read and write would do as virtual memory. It will be connected to a usb card reader and i'll configure windows to rely virtually on the external virtual memory.
I'll be running and playing battlefield 2, unreal 2k4, fallout 2, heroes of might and magic 5 demo, and farcry all at once on a dual core cpu with 2gb of memory.
Any ideas and comments?

 

[acole1]

I'll be interested to see how it goes! :thumbsup:

 

[Varun]

First off Flash has limited reads and writes.

Second, 10MB/s is pretty slow compared to most hard drives, which are able to push out 50-70MB/s.

Third, though the "transfer speed" is often listed as 10-20MB/s for the fast SD memory, that does not necessarily mean the write speed is that fast.

The lack of seek times may help a bit, but I doubt it will be anywhere near as fast as just having the swap on the hard drive.

Still, the results should be interesting and I look forward to your test.

 

[DaveSimmons]

It should burn out pretty quickly given flash memory's limitation on the number of writes.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: girlpower4ever
Any ideas and comments?

That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard.

- M4H

 

[gnumantsc]

Create a ramdisk! Oh the days of ramdisks...... And not even the fact of the limited writes is concerned, but you will be having higher cpu useage because of USB.

 

[SparkyJJO]

Originally posted by: gnumantsc
Create a ramdisk! Oh the days of ramdisks...... And not even the fact of the limited writes is concerned, but you will be having higher cpu useage because of USB.

well in that case just get a ton of ram and disable vitual memory altogether

 

[girlpower4ever]

Windows xp wont allow the external disk of the 2gb sd card to be used as virtual memory, winxp defaults virtual memory on the "c" drive where windows has been installed.
Might have to do with stability issues.
you can set it up on the virtual memory allocator, but when you reboot it, you'll see you have added virtual memory from your primary hdd...

but anyways, its an interesting concept, if anybody can figure out a way to do it 100 percent then let us all know.

ZERO SEEK TIMES ROCKS.

 

[girlpower4ever]

Oh yeah,
forgot to mention that 4gb of decent memory costs around $250-350.00 as well as a compatible board.

 

[her209]

God I hate how Microsoft has renamed the page file to virtual memory. :roll:

virtual memory != virtual memory

 

[GrammatonJP]

Just buy 2 irams, put xp on 1 4gb and put your page file on the 2nd 4gb..

 

[her209]

Originally posted by: GrammatonJP
Just buy 2 irams, put xp on 1 4gb and put your page file on the 2nd 4gb..

Or you could just stripe the two.

 

[ND40oz]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire

Originally posted by: girlpower4ever
Any ideas and comments?

That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard.

- M4H

Might want to let Microsoft know since it's now a built in feature on Vista. You stick in a flash drive and it prompts you to use it for storage or increase performance in the form of a page file device.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: ND40oz

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire

Originally posted by: girlpower4ever
Any ideas and comments?

That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard.

- M4H

Might want to let Microsoft know since it's now a built in feature on Vista. You stick in a flash drive and it prompts you to use it for storage or increase performance in the form of a page file device.

Windows XP page file != Vista page file.

I haven't ripped apart the inner workings, but I'm pretty sure Vista will know what data to page where (high bandwidth sustained = HDD, low latency small = USB).

Also, flash drives have a limited number of read/erase/write cycles. I'd wager this could give you a real handy keychain pretty fast. Never mind the fact that XP will likely throw a fit of rage when it boots up, doesn't recognize or loses the key when it reinitializes USB root, and can't find it's Precious page file.

- M4H

 

[ND40oz]

Here's a decent article on superfetch. It basically predicts what is needed from the hard drive and caches that data to your usb device.

 

[DerwenArtos12]

mildly off topic but, does anyone know where one could pick up an iRam or two?

EDIT: for a reasonable price that is, i can't find one less than $120, weren't they supposedly going to be ~$50 at pre-release.

 

[aidanjm]

Originally posted by: girlpower4ever
Windows xp wont allow the external disk of the 2gb sd card to be used as virtual memory, winxp defaults virtual memory on the "c" drive where windows has been installed.
Might have to do with stability issues.
you can set it up on the virtual memory allocator, but when you reboot it, you'll see you have added virtual memory from your primary hdd...

but anyways, its an interesting concept, if anybody can figure out a way to do it 100 percent then let us all know.

ZERO SEEK TIMES ROCKS.

one way to do it might be to use a 1 gigabyte compact flash card, and install it as an IDE hard drive using a Compact Flash to IDE adapter. The flash would appear as just another IDE hard drive to the operating system.

CF-IDE adapters

edit: but I guess if you have already invested in your usb drives, you might not want to pay for another gig in compact flash

 

[GrammatonJP]

Originally posted by: her209

Originally posted by: GrammatonJP
Just buy 2 irams, put xp on 1 4gb and put your page file on the 2nd 4gb..

Or you could just stripe the two.

You can but since it's microsoft they recommend os and page be on seperate partitions

 

[GrammatonJP]

Originally posted by: DerwenArtos12
mildly off topic but, does anyone know where one could pick up an iRam or two?

EDIT: for a reasonable price that is, i can't find one less than $120, weren't they supposedly going to be ~$50 at pre-release.

Well you missed the boat.. kinda of.. i bought 20 at 120 and sold them on ebay for 200 (first 2 weeks) and 170 there after..

Kept 2 for myself.. now i have a nice 8 gb i-ram system

They estimate 80 for release but sold it for around 120, newegg had it at 135 and recently i saw it for 120 again..

 

[GrammatonJP]

Originally posted by: aidanjm
one way to do it might be to use a 1 gigabyte compact flash card, and install it as an IDE hard drive using a Compact Flash to IDE adapter. The flash would appear as just another IDE hard drive to the operating system.

CF-IDE adapters

edit: but I guess if you have already invested in your usb drives, you might not want to pay for another gig in compact flash

a gig of cf is dirt cheap now.. 20 bucks ? but they have a limited write cycle, so eventually you'll wear out the cf and lose your data.. but how can you tell how many write cycles you have especially running windows.

Stuff I found online
--
Compact Flash cards use Flash Memory. Flash Memory has a limited number of Erase/Write cycles ~ 300,000. The controller in the Compact Flash card does wear leveling by spreading out the writes amongst various 'sectors' in the card to prevent premature wearout of a sector.

Most modern flash memory has a MTBF of 300,000 erase cycles per flash
block, and CF cards use hardware wear leveling to avoid killing any block
early. (even if you constantly write a single logical 'sector' on the
disk, every write will be to a different flash block until all the blocks
have been written.)

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, It's not the memory speed you need to look at it's the USB speed. Still worth a good test. Good Luck, Jim

 

[GrammatonJP]

1GB Swiss Army USB2

1GB Lexar Sports USB2


1GB IRAM

2GB IRAM

2GB IRAM RAID 0 (1gb+1gb)

Seem to be missing my 4/8gb irams

 

[girlpower4ever]

hey
grammaton jp,
you answered my very own question and concept with iram.
i was wondering when this special hardware was going to be released.
thanks
and everybody,
lets start a new thread now on the performance of iram.
i'll order mine soon.

 

[Bobthelost]

There are several around if you want to search for them

 

[OSX]

Any speed gained by not having a seek time, is going to be made up by the slowness of USB for prolonged data transfer, and then the massive Windows issues when your memory stick burns up. Not to mention that any decent harddrive can achieve speeds much faster than 10MB/s. To keep in mind how poor that is, consider this- I have an Adaptec AHA-3985 SCSI-RAID controller from 1995 that was designed for that speed of drive.