Skuzzy, any thoughts?

[rabbidrabbit]

Nice idea but would suck if you lost power for a while.

[Kev367th]

It has an onboad re-chargeable battery - 16 hours lifetime.

[rabbidrabbit]

Thought it said 12 hours... regardless, have you ever lost juice for that long?  I have, quite a few times.  Better save an image and not store anything you really care about.

[Kev367th]

Might of been 12 hours.

Never lost power that long, but for a small say 2Gb I-RAM it's not much to backup somewhere.

[Boroda]

Originally posted by Skuzzy
Page files are purged at each boot, so you would not want to use this device for that.

Using RAM drive on a special PCI card is an idea too weird for me to understand.

Why not just add more RAM as you suggested?

In OS/2 when you had some certain amount of RAM (96 or 128Mb IIRC) you could use a "no-swap" setting to avoid using a page file completely.

Back in the 90s we had a popular device sold here: ArVid ISA board that turned your VCR into a "streamer" (tape drive), recording 2Gb on a VHS 180min tape. I think I still have such a device somewhere in my mega-trashcan. There was a funny idea to record DivX films on ArVid tapes. Why not simply use a video-tape to record video?...

[Kev367th]

'Most' home PC motherboards support a max of 4Gb (shows up as around 3.5Gb) memory.
By adding an I-RAM you get up to 8Gb (perhaps more) of more memory but you use it as a drive instead.

Games that require a lot of loading should benefit from being installed on one of these devices.

Will prob pick one up as I have 2 'spare' 512Mb DDR400. Gonna try loading AH2 onto it.

One prob with XP and Win 2000 is that it always uses the page file. Unlike Win98 where you could remove pagefile usage totally, XP and 2000 require one for error dumps etc.

[Boroda]

Originally posted by Kev367th
Was thinking that the I-RAM with AH2 on should all but get rid of any stutters due to texture loading.
Especially as each new model and new skin increases the amount of memory required, and with most current mobos limited to a max of 4x1Gb, which shows up as around 3.5Gb.
I would guess we're not far off not being able to cache all skins (@512x512) in vid mem.
Only worth if it you happen to have some 'spare' ram lieing around though.

Unless anyone knows of a permanent RAM disk prog? i.e. one that doesnt dump its contents on shutdown (wouldn't think poss, but you never know).

OK, now I got the idea. Keeping your AH installation on a fast solid-state disk may really help.

Why not simply make some procedure that copies a whole AH folder to RAM drive at startup? Make a RAM drive, install AH there (nothing else), then simply copy everything to HDD. Or maybe even make a Norton Ghost or other backup programm image and then on startup restore it to RAM-drive?

Sorry, I am not familiar with RAM-drive programms under W2K/XP, never needed it, nut there must be some availible.

In early-90s I had a special programm to make a RAM drive from VGA-memory, if you used text-mode only you got 256Kb extra drive to place command.com and other applications that were frequently accessed. IIRC it was even before DOS 5 allowed you to use HMA to keep resident drivers "above" 640kb limit and introduced a "disk cache" in XMS concept.

[Boroda]

Originally posted by Kev367th
'Most' home PC motherboards support a max of 4Gb (shows up as around 3.5Gb) memory.
By adding an I-RAM you get up to 8Gb (perhaps more) of more memory but you use it as a drive instead.

Games that require a lot of loading should benefit from being installed on one of these devices.

Will prob pick one up as I have 2 'spare' 512Mb DDR400. Gonna try loading AH2 onto it.

OK, I got the idea, but isn't something like a 1Gb out of 4 for RAM-drive enough to copy a whole installation of some game?  If you have 4Gb installed already and two "spare" 512Mb - then it's worth trying I think.

Originally posted by Kev367th
One prob with XP and Win 2000 is that it always uses the page file. Unlike Win98 where you could remove pagefile usage totally, XP and 2000 require one for error dumps etc.

Damn, MS thinking process is too hard for me to understand sometimes. OS/2 saved error dumps (if you needed to save them for some reason) on floppies...

[Kev367th]

There are RAM disk progs for XP/2000, but remember they all take away from your main memory and are a fixed size.
The I-RAM gives you an extra 8Gb (although this isn't a physical limit) of memory acting as a drive. It uses a SATA (prob 150 on release) interface so you should also be able to use two boards and RAID 0 them if your mobo has RAID SATA raid support.

One advantage of the Amiga was it's dynamic RAM disk, it grew and shrunk with usage.

[Kev367th]

Originally posted by Boroda
OK, I got the idea, but isn't something like a 1Gb out of 4 for RAM-drive enough to copy a whole installation of some game?  If you have 4Gb installed already and two "spare" 512Mb - then it's worth trying I think.

Yes - but
In order to fit 4Gb (3.5 actual) onto a board you use all 4 slots.
With all 4 slots filled your command rate falls to 2T, instead of the faster 1T.

Just checked - current AH2 install is 1.4Gb, this will grow with every new skin or new plane release.

[Boroda]

Originally posted by Kev367th
Yes - but
In order to fit 4Gb (3.5 actual) onto a board you use all 4 slots.
With all 4 slots filled your command rate falls to 2T, instead of the faster 1T.
 

I didn't follow current PC technical stuff closely at least for 2 years. It's intersting, I didn't know it  Didn't think that filling 4 slots (2 banks) will actually slow down the timings.

Anyway, I usually try "fastest possible" memory setting (or find the fastest stable) only to experiment, I never saw any dramatic speed increasing because of it, I mean big enough for me to notice without using some benchmark that shows you extra 3% in some operations. Maybe I am too far behind modern technologies, assemblying mostly cheap office PCs now