h3%5kr3w Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 We all know that SSD drives are blazing fast, but how about a hybrid solution fit for only the windows paging file? Here is my idea: when the write speed catches up with the read speed, and they are alot cheaper (say.. 2 years from now maybe?) I think it would be a cost effective solution to use one as just a drive for a page file. Think about it like this: In a server, this would highly benefit since you would not have to go buy 32gigs of memory for a server, because you could just use the paging file as a slightly lower speed spillover from the memory. Before anybody says anything, I do know that it does not provide ecc, but I mean there is other uses as well. A gaming machine for instance, if you could rewrite some code (or add compatibility) to write all game data that wont fit into ram to an SSD as of now, your performance should improve drasticly (though not for the write times...) What is every1else's thoughts on this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vector Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 flash cache module. i have them for my dell xps m1330 and m1530. what i would like to see is two SSD's combined into one 2.5" enclosure so that you can run it in raid 0. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 I've not seen many places sell flash cache modules after market, been trying to track down some mini pcie and desktop pcie units for some time now. Gigabytes old I-RAM drive would do what you want, and I know other companies have been quietly making ones which can take up to 64GB of DDR2. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vector Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 I've not seen many places sell flash cache modules after market, been trying to track down some mini pcie and desktop pcie units for some time now. Gigabytes old I-RAM drive would do what you want, and I know other companies have been quietly making ones which can take up to 64GB of DDR2. i got mine from dell but if you try looking for the part on the site you wont find it. i had to talk with a sales person over live chat, and teach them what the hell a flash cache module was, but they did find them, they werent cheap though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 Don't suppose you kept the part number? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingwray Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 There's absolutely no point in this. Yes SSD prices will go down and speed increase, however RAM will also do the same. The majority of recent motherboards support 16GB of memory which is by far too much for a desktop or gaming pc at the moment and with large amounts of RAM, windows doesn't even make us of a PageFile. Given that you can get 8GB of memory for less than £100 at the moment and thats plenty enough there will never be a need for a SSD pagefile drive, in fact Samsung recently announced that they can make 4Gbit memory chips allow for a single dimm to hold up to 32GB of memory. As for the server market, SSDs do support ECC, but only a handful of them. But the problem now is that the speed of an SSD is nowhere as fast as memory, looking alone at DDR2 800MHz, its peak transfer rate is 6400 MB/s, which is miles ahead of SSDs currently and in 2 years time. Also given that in the architecture it is designed to be as close and fast to the processor as possible without a horrible SATA interface and the into memory for transfers. I think your forgetting that people don't buy servers because they are "cheap", spending a couple of grand on memory in a server is nothing. As for RAM disks, they never caught on because of their previously prohibitive price and now they won't carry on because SSDs exist. Tom's Hardware recent did a review of a Gigabyte iRAM type device which performed about the same as an SSD, for the same price, but offered less storage and also required backup to a Compact Flash card for persistence which was very slow. Your also forgetting that servers currently have access to extremely fast hard drives in the form of 15,000 rpm SAS drives which when in RAID arrangements provide better performance figures, greater storage and fault protection. SSDs in servers won't be seen for a while yet until reliability and lifespan has been properly evaluated. In short, memory performance will always be considerable better than an SSD and given the availability of memory now and the cheap price, most computers will come with more memory than people can use. I know in real world examples from my MacBook Pro which only has 2GB memory, that its rare that I see it paging out to the disk, and I'm not easy of my computers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vector Posted February 3, 2009 Share Posted February 3, 2009 Don't suppose you kept the part number? ok VaKo I sat on dell live chat for over an hour with two dipshits just for you man, but the good news is that theyre waaay fucking cheaper than they were when i got them like 100 bucks cheaper. http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/product...mp;sku=A1316176 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VaKo Posted February 4, 2009 Share Posted February 4, 2009 You sir, are a star. You have my thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparda Posted February 4, 2009 Share Posted February 4, 2009 Gigabytes old I-RAM drive would do what you want, and I know other companies have been quietly making ones which can take up to 64GB of DDR2. The fun thing about these devices is that SATA 2 is so slow the RAM is just idle* most of the time. Some of them have two SATA2 ports on them so you can run them in a hardware virtual RAID 0. *SATA2 = 3Gbps DDR2 (400Mhz) = 25Gbps Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
2Tall4U Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 ok VaKo I sat on dell live chat for over an hour with two dipshits just for you man, but the good news is that theyre waaay fucking cheaper than they were when i got them like 100 bucks cheaper. http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/product...mp;sku=A1316176 Does this require other hardware to be able to use it or does it require a certain type of mobo? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stingwray Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 Does this require other hardware to be able to use it or does it require a certain type of mobo? Requires the slot to put it in and thats it. Imagine a SATA card which came with the hard drive built in, thats in essence what your getting with this type of module. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
vector Posted February 5, 2009 Share Posted February 5, 2009 your board needs to support intel turbo memory. check your bios settings. or owners manual to see if your lappy supports it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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