Journal Glonoinha's Journal: RamDrive! 7
Actually I'm just looking to attain nerdvana - the fastest computing environment I can possibly manage.
This week Santa brought me exactly what I was hoping for
RamDrive, of course. I downloaded the demo version of SuperSpeed's ramdrive package - it installs at the driver level and looks like just another piece of hardware. 45 Day trial period ought to be plenty. I installed it on the two machines with 2G apiece and broke out the stopwatches - figured that maybe with solid state drives I could finally realize the full potential of the gigabit backbone I put in last month. Two machines get configured, each with a 1.75G ramdrive, and out come the benchmark tests.
Initial feedback : positive, but not unGodly.
When staying on the same machine, copying files of any size from a hard drive to the SSD is still limited by the read throughput of the hard drive - in this case about 35-38 megabytes per second. This isn't bad, and is a HELL of a lot faster than when copying a file to a new place on the same hard drive.
When copying a single big file (800M) to another place on the same SSD things start to heat up - 220 - 240 megabyte/sec range. Given it is reading and writing on the same bus (full duplex) that's close to 500MB/s bandwidth on the memory bus.
I still haven't come up with anything that can benchmark peak read or write throughput, although Nero is reporting my hard drive at 55MB/s and the ramdrive at 1,392MB/s
Moving a big file (1.5G) over the network from one ramdrive to another was a little disappointing - 53MB/s. Over a GigE back end (Intel integrated NIC's on PowerEdge400sc machines, Netgear 5 port GigE switch, hand crimped (by me) cables using Cat5 hardware.) Using regular file copy (command line in a DOS window to avoid any GUI overhead.) I was expecting quite a bit better than this - not sure what to think, where the bottleneck is...
On one machine I have moved the IE (yea, I know
Stay tuned for more insights
cool stuff (Score:2)
RamDrive Benchmark Updates (Score:2)
Four machines, all Dell PowerEdge400sc boxes with P4 2.8GHz hyperthreaded CPUs, running XP Pro sp1, on a Gigabit backbone, Netgear 5 port switch.
Integrated Intel Gigabit NIC's on the motherboard.
Two of the machines have four 512M pc3200 sticks of memory in them (possibly running at pc2700 - the 400sc is real picky about memory timings - but it is running dual channel for what that'
Dynamic data cache (Score:1)
If you have a single 1.65gb file (on a 2gb mem machine) that you want to serve repeatedly over the network, you'll probably not notice much of a difference between serving it from the harddri
Re:Dynamic data cache (Score:2)
Purely an experiment in computer science, I assure you - I have a GigE backbone and by golly I wanted to saturate it.
I have come to the realization that ramdrives are a pipe dream. You can generally make a ramdrive big enough to benchmark, let you know that your dreams are well justified and just how fast your real apps would go if you could put them entirely in ram - but you generally can't make the ramdrive big enough to actually do so.
Re:Dynamic data cache (Score:1)
Of course, they do come at a price premium over regular magnetic drives. =)
Re:Dynamic data cache (Score:2)
Re:Dynamic data cache (Score:1)
This wasn't all to long ago, I think it was in -98, but they were running 386-class machines as local process/robot controllers and such. Due to the vibrations, regular harddrives didn't last more than a few weeks/months, so they had ~$4000 ram-drives in them instead. I w