Windows - Ramdisk's

sirsloop

So I've been thinking up ways to improve performance when editing photos. There's the obvious pocket heavy mods like better processor, more memory, RAID arrays... but how about Windows performance upgrades? I've been thinking about ways to speed up the windows page file. Most home users don't use it all that much, but when editing like 1500+ images you can use upwards of 2GB in windows page file! If you are using vista, its even worse. Even with tons of available memory, windows and some windows applications loads up tons of stuff into the page file.

My initial thought was to add the page file to a raid 0 array that also hosts a batch of images that I'm going to be working on. That should decrease read/write times over a single drive, and in the rare case that a drive pops all you have on there is a copy of pictures that you are working on and a pagefile that has no special data. I was looking into ram disk's and figured I could just slap the page file on one. Now this will only work if you have an excessive amount of available physical memory, I'm thinking 4GB being the bare minimum. This means 64 bit windows. I'm not sure about Mac users and how that works. If you have 8GB worth of system memory on a 64bit OS, dedicate like 2.5-3GB worth of RAM to the page file RAM disk and you're set! Load it up!

I suppose in the (near) future ram will be even cheaper and more available... so inside of 2-3 years we may have access to cheap solid state drives, and ram drives large enough to support editing a batch of images. There are already PCI bus RAM disk boards available with battery backups too... so you can reboot and not lose the data. IDK... just throwin the idea out there. I'll put it into action next weekend...

T. Bombadil

i think this is a great idea. i've done it in the past (long time ago, not editing photos), and got some nice performance improvements. you won't know how much benefit there is with Vista until you've tried it, but my prediction is that it will work well.

that is, provided you have sufficient physical RAM (as you pointed out). the advantage will be lost if Vista would have used the physical RAM directly (had it not been tied up as a RAM drive) or if the OS starts wishing for more room for page files. it is not always clear (to me anyway) what makes it start soaking up space, so it isn't obvious what wall(s) you might run in to.

but hey, if you have the RAM, it is free (and fun) to try. let us know how it goes. will be very interested to hear your results.

EarthDog

Vista
If you're running Vista, and you only have 2GB (only! ), the first thing I'd do is buy one of the $10 1GB USB "thumb drives", and plug that into the machine. Vista will ask you if you want to use it for "ReadyBoost". Say yes, and your machine now has 3GB of RAM. It may not be as not as fast as your main memory, but it makes a very noticeable difference in performance with apps like Photoshop. It's the bargain of the new millenium, in my opinion.

sirsloop

It seems silly to spend money on flash drives when current system ram prices are so low. The performance gains of DDR2 ram over flash is extreme. I mean flash sticks are slower than hard drives!

EarthDog

Slower than hard drives?

sirsloop

Yeah, whats the transfer rate of a one of these flash sticks? 20MB/sec if you are lucky?? We're not talkin about super fast $200 thumb drives... we're talkin about a $10 el cheapo taht fell off the back of a truck straight from china or something.

sirsloop

Here's a recent review of a new thumb drive compared to a 10yr old ATA/33 hard drive...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/usb-hard-drive,2015-9.html

"Our results make clear that products such as the Super Talent Pico C 8 GB USB thumb drives should be used as storage devices for occasional use, and preferably for large files such as photo, audio or video files. They are by no means capable of replacing hard drive when I/O intensive workload is requested, because performance in this task will be disappointing. Should you be looking for a low-capacity drive for a low-power PC, we recommend looking around for other solutions that deliver better performance."

Back to the thumb drive vs more flash comparison... DDR ram is listed with the transfer rate. So common DDR2-6400 is capable of 6400MB/s!!!!!! More RAM FTW!!!!!!!!!

sirsloop

FYI,

I just got my new machine built...

Q9550
P5Q Deluxe
8GB Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C4DHX
500GB 7200.11 Seagate C:
500GB WD RE2
2x 400GB RAID0 WD RE2 drives on a Promise controller
MSI 9800GTX+
stock clockings so far...

Anyways, I ran the machine for a day with no ramdisk, must more responsive than my old 939 4200+...expected. Windows will page files regardless of how much free memory is hangin around. If you turn off the pagefile windows will just default and make one out of your control. I was running with like 7GB free memory and 500-700MB paged. So I fired up RamDisk Plus, chewed up 3.5GB of my available ram and made a ramdisk, pointed 20MB worth of pagefile at my RAID0 scratch drive, and ~3475MB at the ram disk. Not only did the machine process through images much faster after the initial load, hard drive usage is greatly reduced making my machine much quieter. No more chugging and chugging as the machine strains to load up 16+GB worth of RAW thumbnail files into editing software.

i_worship_the_King

This may be the greatest idea I've seen in months. Well done sir, well done.