Flash-Based Hard Drives Cometh

[d_kuhn]

swapfile is a block of disk space used by the operating system as a kind of memory cache... it offloads some in-memory os components or applications that aren't getting a lot of use so the memory can be used by components and applications that are. It is very read/write intensive.

Video Editing may benefit from ssd... probably depending on the application. Normally you spend a lot of time reading video material as you review and sequence your video... and good video editing apps don't actually write anything until you tell it to render your completed project. If the source video was on an ssd, and the rendering destination was on a fast raid array you'd get a good boost from the ssd... just don't render back to the ssd.

 

[Blessedman]

To increase speed and even speed on HDD's can't they internally run a raid0? With HDD's with multi platters do they already do this? each platter could be a drive in the raid0. With SSD you could have block size designating the amount of raid0 drives. Do they already do this? or is this just a crazy idea?

 

[badger101101]

I'm much more excited about the PCI-X based NAND flash drives that also act as their own controller. They overcome almost all of the limitations of SSD's, and are only a little slower than RAM. Imagine that... your entire operating system and all your programs, loading as fast as if they were already in RAM. Computers would no longer be IO-bound. It would be the CPU we would be waiting on.

The only limitation that it doesn't overcome is price.... $30/gb sheesh!

 

[Reagan]

Ramdisks aren't really useful in the current windows architecture... it would just increase your swapfile (which goes to disk). Windows already has a strategy for efficiently using all the memory that's available, by artificially reducing the free memory through a ramdrive you're just forcing the OS to use the swapfile more intensively.

Now back when Dos and the Early versions of Windows were used, swapfiles had a useful purpose (since the OS often had trouble using all the memory available to it).

The TomsHardware article stated that having a DRAM cache for SSD would be pointless, then they go on to say that SSD write performance is about half of a standard 3.5" HD. Now you mention that Ramdisks aren't currently useful, etc.

Seems to me that if the Ramdisk were used as a write-cache, then things may speed up a bit. The write-cache essentially acts as a buffer against data written to SSD. Of course, if you have a very large video file you're writing to SSD then you can overwhelm write-cache. Of course, if average size of write-mix can fit into "Ramdisk" write-cache then you may see a quite favorable speed increase for SSD. No?

Btw, most swapfiles are less than 1GB. I'm planning on getting 4GB (or more) DRAM for next system. I'd be willing to sacrifice 25% of main memory for a write-cache, especially if I get SSD [read] performance. Lastly, I've been using 36GB Raptor's in Raid 0 for a couple years now and the size really isn't a limitation, especially w/ DVD burners and USB drives.

 

[Turas]

The problem with the PCI-X solution like the fusionIo (or whatever it is called) is that they are not out yet, where as you can not get up to 128GB SSD's from Super Talent. Yes they are expensive but the fact that they are out is a good thing.

 

[MrCommunistGen]

Curious... why is this article back on the main page? I was really excited to read it when I saw it because I thought it was new, but quickly realized that I'd read it before.

-mcg

 

[d_kuhn]

The TomsHardware article stated that having a DRAM cache for SSD would be pointless, then they go on to say that SSD write performance is about half of a standard 3.5" HD. Now you mention that Ramdisks aren't currently useful, etc.

Seems to me that if the Ramdisk were used as a write-cache, then things may speed up a bit. The write-cache essentially acts as a buffer against data written to SSD. Of course, if you have a very large video file you're writing to SSD then you can overwhelm write-cache. Of course, if average size of write-mix can fit into "Ramdisk" write-cache then you may see a quite favorable speed increase for SSD. No?

Btw, most swapfiles are less than 1GB. I'm planning on getting 4GB (or more) DRAM for next system. I'd be willing to sacrifice 25% of main memory for a write-cache, especially if I get SSD [read] performance. Lastly, I've been using 36GB Raptor's in Raid 0 for a couple years now and the size really isn't a limitation, especially w/ DVD burners and USB drives.

I don't think a DRAM Write Cache for an SSD would be pointless, It wouldn't help much for large blocks of data... but it would give a boost for apps that have a lot of small blocks of data being periodically written.

Under windows... the swapfile is used regardless of the amount of memory in the machine. I've got several machines with 4GB, the one I'm looking at right now also has 4gig and a windows managed 5GB swapfile (3.8GB of which is allocated)... so Windows seems to be able to use as much memory as you can throw at it. So basically... even if you add more memory than your current memory + swapfile size... the Windows guys will tell you that you STILL need a swapfile, and based on what I've seen on large memory machines - that's true.

 

[shacharoren]

can someone help a dude that don't understand?
i need to know what is swapfile?
can someone direct me to a good article?
tnx.

 

[rockyjohn]

can someone help a dude that don't understand?
i need to know what is swapfile?
can someone direct me to a good article?
tnx.

Here is a short explanation from Window's Help"

Managing computer memory
When your computer is running low on random access memory (RAM) and more is needed to complete your current task, Windows uses hard drive space to simulate system RAM. In Windows, this is known as virtual memory, and often called the pagefile. This is similar to the UNIX swapfile. The default size of the virtual memory pagefile (appropriately named Pagefile.sys) created during installation is 1.5 times the amount of RAM on your computer.

You can optimize virtual memory use by dividing the space between multiple drives and by removing it from slower or heavily accessed drives. To best optimize your virtual memory space, divide it across as many physical hard drives as possible. When selecting drives, keep the following guidelines in mind:

Try to avoid having a pagefile on the same drive as the system files.
Avoid putting a pagefile on a fault-tolerant drive, such as a mirrored volume or a RAID-5 volume. Pagefiles do not need fault-tolerance, and some fault-tolerant systems are slow because they write data to multiple locations.
Do not place multiple pagefiles on different partitions on the same physical disk drive.

 

[bknapp777]

I'm interested in using a Sandisk flashdrive as a temporary place for my pagefile. Unfortunately, two programs on my terminal servers won't run in a 64 bit environment and I'm forced to run in 32 bit mode (4 gig max mem). I'm hoping that even though my write performance will take a hit compared to my traditional drives, the read performance will make up for the difference. It's worth a shot at this point. It's either that, or double the number of Servers that we are currently running. I'll post my results once known. Thank you all for the interesting and helpful posts.