Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Kev367th on June 23, 2005, 12:10:21 AM
-
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,121105,00.asp
PCI card that lets you use ram as a hard drive.
Any use for loading AH2 on?
Would have faster access than hard drive.
Or how about as page file?
Theres two things the article doesn't mention -
1) The final one should have a SATA2 not SATA1 interface.
2) You should be able to link two into a RAID array.
-
Hehe, thats funny. I like how they "discovered" the idea. I did virtually the same thing with my 8086 PC clone back in 1991, except mine was a ROM drive, not a RAM drive. Used boot information flashed onto EPROMS on an ISA card from Radio Shack. The EPROM programmer was the most expensive part. Whole thing cost me 50 bucks, but it was an "instant-on" computer thereafter, and freed up that precious little bit of space on my 20MB hard drive. The plans also included a theoretical RAM drive, but noted the cost was prohibitive. I bought the plans from a company out in Colorado from an ad in PC Shopper.
Also, didnt "Expanded Memory" later in the 90s use the same idea? Memory modules on add-on cards?
The idea has a proven track record, although it never caught on (mostly due to cost issues). Memory is cheap enough now. I'll see if I can dig up the plans that show how to make the add-on card recognized by DOS as a hard drive.
-
Page files are purged at each boot, so you would not want to use this device for that.
Loading all the skins and resource files for Aces high II into it would help AH a bit, but there would still be time needed for uncompressing them to load them on the video card.
Would be interesting to see how much help it could be for those who do not have 1GB of ram in thier system (currently).
Some would argue it would be better to add systme ram, but Aces High's memory footprint is growing. With the release of each set of skins and/or with the adding of new planes/vehicles it will require more and more ram to run smoothly.
-
Skuzzy - Why does purging of the page file make it unsuitable?
StarOfAfrica - Yup, and I also remember when you could mount SCSI drives on a card and add as much cache RAM as you could afford onto it.
Two things not mentioned -
1) Release version may be SATA2 not SATA1
2) Two can be linked in RAID array.
-
I said that badly (really badly...I shoul dhave finished my coffee first). The page file is going to fill with stuff not being used. The stuff being used by the system will normally not reside in the page file.
-
Lol no probs, I'm a bit fuzzy prior to my 1st morning coffee.
I always thoguht Windows used the pagefile as 'virtual memory'?
Surely there would be some gains just from lower access times?
Like you said, maybe useful for skin cache etc.
-
Found some benchies on it, even RAID 0 striped Raptors couldn't come close to it.
(http://www.behardware.com/medias/photos_news/00/13/IMG0013190.gif)
-
Any type of non-mechanical mass storage system will always be faster than a hard drive. If not, then it is badly designed.
However, for maximum performance, one would have to really look at how one uses the computer system.
-
Yeah,
Latest is is has been changed to allow up to 8gb per board, and may come out with SATA2 instead of SATA1.
Good thing is at SATA1 speeds you could use any "old" PC2400 mem sticks you had lieing around to populate it without a performance hit.
For SATA2 you would need minimum of PC3200 mem sticks.
-
http://mac-guild.org/raid.html :lol
-
Originally posted by Stone
http://mac-guild.org/raid.html :lol
Novel if nothing else :)
Thinking the I-Ram might be good to load AH2 on, fast access, and very high speed transfers.
$60 ish for the board, and I have 2x512 DDR400 lying spare. Although really all you need is RAM in excess of 150mb/s if the board stays at SATA150.
If they release it as SATA2 (300), then your looking at PC3200, fairly cheap now (1Gb = $66).
Currently AH2 installation around 740Mb.
-
i had my Aces high install on my 2x80gig IDE drives and it was nice and fast
however now, since ive moved to my A8N SLI Premium i cant run the raid, and id got so used to how fast the raid was its shocking how slow it is now. Even though the Sata drives are faster in general useage hmm.... I knew i should have gone mad and got 2x200gig sata's :)
-
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).
-
Originally posted by StarOfAfrica2
and freed up that precious little bit of space on my 20MB hard drive.
Was that the same 20 meg hard drive the salesman said, "I don't know what you would ever use 20 megs for." ;) :lol :rofl
-
they should also make a program as standard that "backups" the data onto the HDD as a ISO or whatever file. Whenever you want to (ie click backup now) or you can set it to back up every day at a certain time or something.
-
Nice idea but would suck if you lost power for a while.
-
It has an onboad re-chargeable battery - 16 hours lifetime.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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?...
-
'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.
-
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.
-
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...
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 :(