Vex Star

Yeah bwoiee.

I have no idea what possessed me to do this, but I bought a 300x CF card and a CF-to-IDE adaptor to use it with, then I set it to be my Z: drive and put a 1.8GB pagefile on it. I figured it would benefit from the virtually-nonexistent random seek times that FLASH memory has, and that 300x (45MB/s) would be fast enough to be useful. I was right; PCMark05 reported a consistent increase in HDD performance of about 500 points, and more importantly, my HDDs are quieter, especially on bootup — which actually matters when your boot disk consists of three fucking Raptors that sound like coffee grinders on a good day.

One note: I had to use a special driver for the CF card to get Windows to treat it like a fixed disk (instead of a removable one), because without that it won’t put the pagefile on it. I don’t know if it’s the stock driver for Hitachi Microdrives or if someone edited it, but either way, if someone else wants to do the same thing, PM me and I’ll send you the driver I used.

Was it worth $75? Meh, I dunno, but it was a fun project and it improved things a bit.
awesome. now you can chew up a cf card in short-order

seriously tho… 11ty/10 on the retard-o-meter.
We’ll see how long it lasts. But whatever, it’s got a lifetime warranty.

I think I can deal with pegging the retard-o-meter if it also means I get a 10% increase in HDD performance.
i think you’d be better off with one of those adapters that allowed you to plug in sdram/ddr as a hard drive. i know they had limitations, i think they released another version that accepted ddr2 or something

boot times were amazing with those, but they relied on a small battery to keep all the data intact

Nope, still no DDR2 version of the iram. Which is a shame considering the price of DDR2.

the batt is a moot point when it’s just a pagefile.
What about a way to use a 8GB SD card?
I would think SD cards would be cheaper and easier to find. I know I can get an 8gb SD card at microcenter for $30. Although I did just find a 8GB CF card at newegg for $36 including shipping

I like that it cuts down on the seeking of the Raptors.

That’s seriously not a bad thing.

Is there anything inherent about that setup that couldn’t be done off of a USB thumb drive?

I’ve got a 4gb Corsair Flash Voyager GT sitting around that is pretty speedy for a USB drive.

yeah good point, i was pointing out the battery as a shortcoming to the device in general, but for a page file who cares.

too bad they don’t make it compatible with ddr2, i would buy one right now. could you imagine how quickly video transcoding and dvd ripping would be?

meh no diff than having a buttload of system ram. actually system ram would be a bit faster because it goes cpu > mem controller > ram… These ram-as-storage cards put the pci-express bus in the way.

no, i-ram uses a sata connection. it plugs into the pci slot for power. but it is limited to 4gb ddr1 and sata 150.

if the second generation of i-ram will ever come out, you could put 16gb or so on it. that would be enough to have an OS + rip dvds and transcode some video very quickly, much quicker than a hard drive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

could you imagine a RAID-0?

raid0 has thus-far proven nearly useless.

Even sata-150 is not as fast as system memory thru the mem controller. just need to properly write something to take advantage of it (and have enough system memory). 64-bit systems make that possible. I’m surprised we don’t see some enthusiast mobos with six or eight memory slots.
11ty/10 would be using readyboost in Vista…

Edit: Assuming it probably damages the flash drive from reading and writing

Probably a waste but who gives a fuck? Cool project.

Screw it. A £10, 2GB flash drive seems to be pretty good. PhotoShop CS3 starts in 3 seconds where it used to take around 10

I can handle wearing out a £10 drive.
why wouldn’t you just use that money to add extra RAM so you don’t have to use your pagefile?

Lexar makes 8GB 300x CompactFlash cards, but not SD cards. CompactFlash will always be the fastest memory card, because it has more electrical contacts and so it has greater bandwidth than cards with fewer contacts.

My board has three RAM slots. I’m using two right now, in dual-channel mode. If I wanted to add more RAM, I’d either have to add a third card and give up dual-channel, or replace the two RAM cards I have right now.

I actually considered what you asked about, and I went on Newegg to price out more RAM. I have 2x 1GB DDR400 right now, so first I looked at that; the CompactFlash pagefile cost about half as much. Then I looked at 2x 2GB DDR400, which is what I’d need if I wanted to upgrade, and Newegg doesn’t even sell 2GB DDR400 cards.

Besides, the point was to see if it would work, and if it would improve performance. I’ve already overclocked my Athlon XP (and by extension, everything else plugged into the motherboard), I’ve already got a hardware-controlled RAID, I’ve maxed out the RAM, I installed extra USB ports inside the case for a memory card reader and a USB hard drive with an internal docking bay, I’ve got a PSU with modular cables to keep things tidy, etc…

Using an SSD was just about the only thing I haven’t done to trick out my machine yet, so it was a natural next step.
you should have saved your money for a new machine. you must be planning that soon.

I was going to get an Athlon 64 machine. Then I was going to get a Core2Duo machine. Then I was going to get a Phenom machine. Now I’m thinking I’ll get a Nehalem machine.

The basic problem is my Athlon XP machine continues to do what I need it to do, and even if the improvements I make to it are incremental and the law of diminishing returns is kicking in, it’s still fun to see if I can eke out a bit more from my old hardware.

Kinda the same reason why I’m dicking around with a 4-cylinder Passat instead of buying a 6-liter G8.

Nope, I have the 1.8t. Much easier to modify, gets better gas mileage, and once modified properly, it’ll make more power than the V6 and still get better gas mileage, because the engine is lighter. 3500lbs. is heavy enough for any passenger sedan, it doesn’t need even more weight.

The V6 is more reliable, but only because it stays cooler. If VW had used silicone hoses instead of rubber hoses, the 1.8t’s heat bath wouldn’t make shit wear out so damned fast.
vw doesn’t know much about reliability except in cases of the utmost simplicity.

this i’ll concur with. i own a 2001 1.8T passat that has had a few reliability issues, although lately it’s been ok.

But that 10 year 100K mile drivetrain warranty make they comfortable.

what is with you mis-using "they" tonight?

vw has only a 5/60k warranty, iirc, as of 2002.

usually, yes. But VW had the old fox, rabbit, and bug.
very cool
i might actually want to try this one out.

also, how come the page file is used so much during boot up? i had no idea that this happened lol
How is this going now deus?

Apparently, you may be better off to use it as an external journal. At least that seems to be the case on Ext3, for fancy RAIDs (6, maybe 5?).

I like these guys.

I might need to do this.

I’m not sure why; I’m not really sure it is used that much during bootup, except to allocate and de-allocate segments of the pagefile as processes get loaded and demand more memory than they’ll ever really use, but whatever the case may be, it definitely is quieter on bootup with the CF card taking some of the hits.

Interesting idea. Not practical on a Windows system, I’m afraid, but for that you can always get one of Fujitsu’s new hybrid HDDs with the built-in FLASH cache. (heh, it rhymes!)

Anyway, it’s still working fine. If there were a way to check what the wear on the card is, I’d do it, but given that I bought a good card from a reputable company, I’m not worried about it wearing out before the end of the computer’s lifetime.

it also seems like it would be pretty easy to swap for a new card if that one burned out, right? there is no data being stored so at worst if it dies during use your PC may crash until you swap it out and redo the pagefile on the new one.
It would probably just throw up a stream of delayed-write failures, at which point I’d hard-off the computer and swap out the card.

The card is formatted, so I’d have to reformat the new card on another computer and use a utility to make a new blank 1.8GB file called "pagefile.sys", but that would take about five minutes. Not a huge loss.

I was forever pronouncing cache as cashay but I’ve known for a long time that that’s wrong. Still took me 2 mins to realise where your rhyme was. I’m still saying cashay.

If I do that external journal thing, I guess a hybrid drive could be very worth it! But does it need to be many gigabytes? 400Mb per partition, therefore 4Gb = loads I THINK. Could get an SSD, down the road. I will need to work it out. Not worrying yet.

I wish for a way to check the wear too.

Once I heard that with wear levelling an SSD can stand AT LEAST (As in the very worst case) one year of pretty hectic writing. There was a very good page that I might link back here if I get to it in the near future. Then again swap space is used a lott.

But I also heard that SSDs don’t do wear levelling accross the entire drive. Actually I think that was just Flash cards, which makes some sense.
Oh yes. I got a link:

Technically speaking, it is pronounced "cashay", it’s just that we Americans usually treat trailing e’s as silent — cashay, coopay, rooay, etc…

I guess it’s not surprising that SSDs don’t do wear-leveling across the entire drive, because the fractal algorithm used to do wear-leveling grows exponentially in complexity as the area covered increases. Eventually you’d hit a point where the embedded controller couldn’t keep up. It’s probably easier to treat the SSD as a spanned disk with multiple separate areas covered by multiple separate controllers running multiple separate algorithms. That SiliconSystems SSD must be pretty pricey if it has a single controller that can wear-level the entire disk at once.

From that description, it sounds like pagefile duty is the best possible assignment for my CF disk — data never persists past a single boot cycle, and rarely persists for more than a few hours, so I should get close to the theoretical maximum lifespan for my money spent.

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March 30th, 2009 | Category: general | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL