the question if there aren't swap file loading as the system starts up before it loads up the usb drivers. doesn't matter if the usb is connected directly to the pins or outside, it's the same thing.
Anyway since 8-16gb CF cards might be too little to hold vista anyways, and Readyboost ain't an option for XP users, it's probably ain't the solution. unless vista can be skimpped down to fit with vLite, never tried that before.
Anybody gone HD-less?
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The box/bay version has the same limitation as the board version: 4x1G DDR1.Plekto wrote:It [i-RAM] now comes in a box/drive bay version that supports 8gb. (4X2GB).
This fabled product has been anticipated for three years. I think this is a dead-end product line.Even if Gigabyte does move ahead and release a DDR-II varaint with SATA300 support
The motherboard has to support USB booting for this to work, but you could use a USB drive with a connector. Of course, a usb drive usually has cheap memory that would fry in a month or so, so it might not be a great idea to put the swap file on it.
Me, I'd just get a used i-ram with a dead or nearly so battery. Since this is a swap file only implementation, data backup is moot. Load, tweak with the swap file, reboot. Power dies, shrug your shoulders and repeat. My machine takes about 1 minute to reboot anyways.
Ebay Item number: 150233688465 - A typical listing. For $100, I think it might be worth it if you have some old ram lying around. Add in a flash drive for the main OS and presto - a few hundred dollars and no hard drives. Perfect for a media PC or similar as well.
Yes, the swap file will be running at half of your real memory speeds, but that's not so bad a compromise, IMO. SATA2 would allow full bandwidth, though. If Gigabyte would make a DDR2/Sata 2 version of this, it would be the hottest thing on the market. 16gb and the same speed as your physical ram.
Note - even putting the swapfile on a drive connected to the second controller is a massive improvement. It thrashes and cleans up and whatnot while your apps keep running along. This is a 1 minute fix that helps the speed in windows greatly, yet most people don't do this.
P.S. I can't really describe the immense gain in speed by doing this. This can make XP or especially Vista feel like you are running Kubuntu. Just that instant and snappy of a response. I know I've been talking about XP, but Vista needs something like this even moreso, since the slowdown is largely due to the immense amount of background processes and i/o activity.
Me, I'd just get a used i-ram with a dead or nearly so battery. Since this is a swap file only implementation, data backup is moot. Load, tweak with the swap file, reboot. Power dies, shrug your shoulders and repeat. My machine takes about 1 minute to reboot anyways.
Ebay Item number: 150233688465 - A typical listing. For $100, I think it might be worth it if you have some old ram lying around. Add in a flash drive for the main OS and presto - a few hundred dollars and no hard drives. Perfect for a media PC or similar as well.
Yes, the swap file will be running at half of your real memory speeds, but that's not so bad a compromise, IMO. SATA2 would allow full bandwidth, though. If Gigabyte would make a DDR2/Sata 2 version of this, it would be the hottest thing on the market. 16gb and the same speed as your physical ram.
Note - even putting the swapfile on a drive connected to the second controller is a massive improvement. It thrashes and cleans up and whatnot while your apps keep running along. This is a 1 minute fix that helps the speed in windows greatly, yet most people don't do this.
P.S. I can't really describe the immense gain in speed by doing this. This can make XP or especially Vista feel like you are running Kubuntu. Just that instant and snappy of a response. I know I've been talking about XP, but Vista needs something like this even moreso, since the slowdown is largely due to the immense amount of background processes and i/o activity.
instructions for setting up WinXP on CF
Here's some info on booting from CF, and also instructions for setting up WinXP on the card. It recommend turning off the swap file.
http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/faq-bootcf.asp
http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/faq-bootcf.asp
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6820220261
This is an affordable example that supports ready boost. Not as fast as a typical sata drive, but not impossibly slow, either. This, plus some sort of ramdisk for the swap file would cost you maybe $300 to go drive-less.
It is 8Gb max. The limitation is because unbuffered 2Gb DDR1 modules are hard to find and largely didn't exist in 2005 when they designed the device. But they do exist and work in the "box" unit if you can cough up the cash, that is. The original can't handle the current draw through the PCI bus for 8Gb, but the "box" version draws power directly from the PSU.
http://www.crayeon3.com/c3/pc-293-47-.aspx
Pricey. Why they didn't use DDR2, I'll never know. DDR2 plus ECC would have also made it viable for cheap raid, since 2Gb modules are a snap to find. $200 for 8Gb of DDR2 is common now.
Newegg lists 2x1 GB of OCZ DDR400 memory for $60.($55 for the no-name stuff) Not too unreasonable, really, since it would be all you'd need.
This is an affordable example that supports ready boost. Not as fast as a typical sata drive, but not impossibly slow, either. This, plus some sort of ramdisk for the swap file would cost you maybe $300 to go drive-less.
It is 8Gb max. The limitation is because unbuffered 2Gb DDR1 modules are hard to find and largely didn't exist in 2005 when they designed the device. But they do exist and work in the "box" unit if you can cough up the cash, that is. The original can't handle the current draw through the PCI bus for 8Gb, but the "box" version draws power directly from the PSU.
http://www.crayeon3.com/c3/pc-293-47-.aspx
Pricey. Why they didn't use DDR2, I'll never know. DDR2 plus ECC would have also made it viable for cheap raid, since 2Gb modules are a snap to find. $200 for 8Gb of DDR2 is common now.
Newegg lists 2x1 GB of OCZ DDR400 memory for $60.($55 for the no-name stuff) Not too unreasonable, really, since it would be all you'd need.
DrJ wrote:That's what I meant. It is not limited to Linux -- Unix and the BSDs can do the same. I did this with Sun Unix (which as BSD-based at the time) almost 20 years ago, so it certainly is not new. I'm not sure about Windows, since I am less fluent with its details.lm wrote:No local mass storage whatsoever is possible.
In linux, that is... I already did it 5 years ago, my file server was in a storage room, and the PC in my room had _no_ _mass_ _storage_ _whatsoever_. No floppy, no optical, no flash, no hard drive, nothing!
Another option is simply to execute applications off the server by running a remote X session. It is the same sort of idea -- boot from the server, but the only local application you run is X11. Everything else is executed off the server.
Not limited to *nix OS'es ether. Spent the last week getting an XP install booting via AoE (ATA over Ethernet). Using gigabit ethernet (without jumbo frames) my "drive" speeds are excellent, 50MBps which is not much slower than the actual drive in the AoE server. My testing was actually done using my work laptop, so 50MBps was alot faster than the local laptop drive.
PS. This is completely diskless, no USB key, no drives at all. Installed Mediaportal and it runs like any other install.
I figured that there should be a way to do this in Windows, but I just didn't know the details.badkarma wrote:Not limited to *nix OS'es ether. Spent the last week getting an XP install booting via AoE (ATA over Ethernet). Using gigabit ethernet (without jumbo frames) my "drive" speeds are excellent, 50MBps which is not much slower than the actual drive in the AoE server.
For me the advantages are 1) it can be much more quiet, 2) the drives on servers are often much faster. I run 15K SCSI drives in RAID on my server, and there is no way any single desktop drive can match that, 3) software maintenance is easier if you use the same software complement on a number of computers, and 4) backup is easier, since it is localized in one place. I also tend to be better at backing up the server simply because all the "good stuff" is on it.
The downsides are latency, set-up complexity and perhaps load if you run a *lot* of computers off one server. Mine tend to be fairly lightly loaded, so this is not a big deal.
btw, what's the difference of SSD's from other flash medias? how come they're "ok" as system disks, how come they handle the writes of the swap file well? or do they?
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory ... 36&Tpk=ssd
Some aren't too expensive, but i would still wait half a year or so for prices to drop (around xmas i guess).
Even if i do manage to get all my needs for OS/Drivers/Apps on one 8gb CF card (or a remote network drive), the pagefile still messes it all up.
Unless i can count on a usb dok to handle that.
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory ... 36&Tpk=ssd
Some aren't too expensive, but i would still wait half a year or so for prices to drop (around xmas i guess).
Even if i do manage to get all my needs for OS/Drivers/Apps on one 8gb CF card (or a remote network drive), the pagefile still messes it all up.
Unless i can count on a usb dok to handle that.
DrJ wrote:I figured that there should be a way to do this in Windows, but I just didn't know the details.badkarma wrote:Not limited to *nix OS'es ether. Spent the last week getting an XP install booting via AoE (ATA over Ethernet). Using gigabit ethernet (without jumbo frames) my "drive" speeds are excellent, 50MBps which is not much slower than the actual drive in the AoE server.
For me the advantages are 1) it can be much more quiet, 2) the drives on servers are often much faster. I run 15K SCSI drives in RAID on my server, and there is no way any single desktop drive can match that, 3) software maintenance is easier if you use the same software complement on a number of computers, and 4) backup is easier, since it is localized in one place. I also tend to be better at backing up the server simply because all the "good stuff" is on it.
The downsides are latency, set-up complexity and perhaps load if you run a *lot* of computers off one server. Mine tend to be fairly lightly loaded, so this is not a big deal.
What's the latency with local drives? I thought they're usually in the several millisecond range. My network latency on my LAN is always <1ms. The only downsides in my case are complexity and lack of a Windows AoE target. I really wish Mediaportal TVServer ran on linux. I may try to run Xen and see of PCI Direct Access will work with MP guests.
BTW, the author of WinAoE told me he was getting 90MBps disk access over gigabit with 2k jumbo frames and a RAID5 target. That's faster than my local drives.
Well, you are adding Ethernet servicing on both ends of the transfer in addition to the data retrieval from the disk. That has to add latency; whether it is significant is a different matter.badkarma wrote:What's the latency with local drives? I thought they're usually in the several millisecond range. My network latency on my LAN is always <1ms.
I do better than that from a comparable setup; NFS on FreeBSD is a tad slow though.BTW, the author of WinAoE told me he was getting 90MBps disk access over gigabit with 2k jumbo frames and a RAID5 target. That's faster than my local drives.
It seems that what you are describing is not "standard Windows." How would it usually be handled? Through terminal services?
Not standard Windows? Which part are you talking about? For AoE, the AoE system drive just appears as a regular system drive in Windows. I don't even need great thoroughput tbh, the client device is only there to stream hdtv and hd media which I have never seen peak over 30Mbps.DrJ wrote: I do better than that from a comparable setup; NFS on FreeBSD is a tad slow though.
It seems that what you are describing is not "standard Windows." How would it usually be handled? Through terminal services?
Oh AoE is definitely not a standard OS thing. iSCSI however is, you can download Microsoft iSCSI initiators for all their current OS's. The problem is that only the Windows 2003 iSCSI initiator is bootable. I don't paticularly want to run W2k3 on my HTPC frontends though. The etherboot guys apparently are planning on writing a bootable iSCSI initiator for XP.DrJ wrote:Only that it is not part of Windows OS as it is distributed, and nothing more. From your posts it also sounds recent. None of this is intended to be negative.badkarma wrote:Not standard Windows? Which part are you talking about?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA maximum throughput for SATA 3.0 Gbit/s (or SATA 2) is 300 MB/s.Plekto wrote: The next version, if it supports DDR2, will handle 4Gb memory modules for sure. 16Gb of instant access. SATA2 maxxes out at the same bandwidth as most on-board memory, so it will work like a software ramdisk. The advantage, though, is that this works like a drive.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDR2_SDRAM maximum throughput for DDR2-800 is 6400 MB/s. Dual channel architecture doubles this.
So SATA throughput is 5% of the throughput of single-channel DDR2-800, which makes your claim far from correct.
Since most memory is really 200mhz internally, and no system runs at a 1:1 memory to fsb ratio of over 200mhz, usually, the actual throughput of most memory is quite a bit less. So SATA 2 is closer to 10% of the ram's speed. (somehow I was converting bits to bytes in the calculations)
Yes, the memory is fast. Too bad nobody makes separate dedicated memory slots for a ramdisk on their motherboards.
Still, for loading files and such as opposed to intensive calculations, SATA 3.0 ram disks run at close to instant speed. Windows will boot from a Ram-San in under 5 seconds. It's a noticeable improvement over basic SATA.
Yes, the memory is fast. Too bad nobody makes separate dedicated memory slots for a ramdisk on their motherboards.
Still, for loading files and such as opposed to intensive calculations, SATA 3.0 ram disks run at close to instant speed. Windows will boot from a Ram-San in under 5 seconds. It's a noticeable improvement over basic SATA.
Last edited by Plekto on Mon Apr 21, 2008 2:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I went diskless for most of my workstations a while ago; I even wrote up a how-to on how to do it with Debian. My file server is the only one with active hard drives; the other machines boot off the network (I have backup hard drives in some of the "diskless" workstations, but they are used strictly for backups and aren't mounted in any way except during the running of backup scripts).
My main reason for going diskless was that it was cheaper than laptop drives. Before, I had already mastered cheap ghetto enclosures for laptop drives, but diskless is even cheaper. Since my main criteria was cost, I don't have any fancy gigabit hardware. It's all plain old 100mbit...good for 10 megs/second with nfs...not very fast, but not slower than the cheap old laptop drives I used before.
My main reason for going diskless was that it was cheaper than laptop drives. Before, I had already mastered cheap ghetto enclosures for laptop drives, but diskless is even cheaper. Since my main criteria was cost, I don't have any fancy gigabit hardware. It's all plain old 100mbit...good for 10 megs/second with nfs...not very fast, but not slower than the cheap old laptop drives I used before.
Just wanted to point on thing out, the cheap CF->SATA converters are junk. I got 4 of them and I basically have given up on using them. Also bought 4 266x Adata CF cards to go with them... 4 drive raid0 was plan.
Problems:
I cannot get them all to be detected consistently. Ie turn system on only 3 of 4 are seen. Have to restart it a bunch of times to get all detected.
One is slower than the rest, three work at 25MB/sec the other is 17MB/sec... swap the CF cards around doesn't matter.
I think they are absolutely total junk as if you look at the picture on websites, see the chip with the shiny 'Quality Control' sticker on it? Pull that off and the chips on all these cheapo cards are sanded down so you can't read who makes them. WHY WOULD SOMEONE DO THIS?! I'm guessing they were from a bad run and rather than tossing them they got sold for cheap.. and in order not to look bad they sanded their name off the chips.
Anyways I got XP to work on 3 drive RAID0 pretty well.. except I had to keep rebooting it. When it did work it was felt much faster than any HD setup I've used. Making 8 drive arrays can get huge throughput but you rarely feel the speed in Windows... SSD feel much faster.
I admit that I think 2 of the 4 cards I have work much better thant he other two... 50% failure is still bad... and the remaining two arn't perfect.
Also controller really matters, no real raid controllers work as they have no smart data, need to use cheapo sata controllers or onboard stuff.
Problems:
I cannot get them all to be detected consistently. Ie turn system on only 3 of 4 are seen. Have to restart it a bunch of times to get all detected.
One is slower than the rest, three work at 25MB/sec the other is 17MB/sec... swap the CF cards around doesn't matter.
I think they are absolutely total junk as if you look at the picture on websites, see the chip with the shiny 'Quality Control' sticker on it? Pull that off and the chips on all these cheapo cards are sanded down so you can't read who makes them. WHY WOULD SOMEONE DO THIS?! I'm guessing they were from a bad run and rather than tossing them they got sold for cheap.. and in order not to look bad they sanded their name off the chips.
Anyways I got XP to work on 3 drive RAID0 pretty well.. except I had to keep rebooting it. When it did work it was felt much faster than any HD setup I've used. Making 8 drive arrays can get huge throughput but you rarely feel the speed in Windows... SSD feel much faster.
I admit that I think 2 of the 4 cards I have work much better thant he other two... 50% failure is still bad... and the remaining two arn't perfect.
Also controller really matters, no real raid controllers work as they have no smart data, need to use cheapo sata controllers or onboard stuff.
I have an Addonics SATA CF adapter. I've installed both Ubuntu Linux and WinXP to 133x cards and found that Linux runs much better from these things. It took hours to install Windows and hours to install the motherboard drivers and utilities. Probably six hours to do those two installs, and I haven't even gotten to Windows Updates. Now that it's installed it runs better than I thought it would, but it's still pretty painful. Linux installed in a couple hours and is slow but tolerable. The base Ubuntu installation with drivers for the graphics and whatnot comes to about 2.1G. Windows about 1.6G before any Windows Updates.
Programs that load a whole bunch of little files do load much more quickly. GIMP for example loads in about three seconds from CF, and both Linux and WIndows boot fairly quickly. But other things you don't expect to take any time at all are slow. Like the first time you press the Start button you have to wait several seconds for it to respond.
These things aren't for your everyday main computer, but if you have a hands-off application it might work for you.
Since the installation is smaller than I anticipated I'm going to try installing Linix on an 8G 266x card.
The Eee PC runs from SD and people seem quite pleased with it.
Programs that load a whole bunch of little files do load much more quickly. GIMP for example loads in about three seconds from CF, and both Linux and WIndows boot fairly quickly. But other things you don't expect to take any time at all are slow. Like the first time you press the Start button you have to wait several seconds for it to respond.
These things aren't for your everyday main computer, but if you have a hands-off application it might work for you.
Since the installation is smaller than I anticipated I'm going to try installing Linix on an 8G 266x card.
The Eee PC runs from SD and people seem quite pleased with it.
I've not tried it, but I don't see why something like Micronis Migrate Easy wouldn't work. That's what I use to transition to new hard drives every time I change one.tha_lode wrote:Is it possible to move the installation over to a flashdisk? You see I spent two weeks removing crapware and getting a usable setup on the hdd.
While I've never migrated a Windows install to a flash drive, I've used the "dd" method to clone from one hard drive to another:
http://justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=134457
I use section "B", which is a generic way to clone the whole shebang. I've used it to clone over multi-partition multi-boot setups (both Windows and Linux on the same drive).
In order to use this to go from a big hard drive to a really small one (like a flash drive), you'd first use GParted or Partition Magic or Vista'a own partition utility to shrink/shift partitions to a smaller overall size than the new drive. Then, use "dd" to clone over the drive. After this, you can use a partition utility to expand the partitions to use any extra space.
http://justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?t=134457
I use section "B", which is a generic way to clone the whole shebang. I've used it to clone over multi-partition multi-boot setups (both Windows and Linux on the same drive).
In order to use this to go from a big hard drive to a really small one (like a flash drive), you'd first use GParted or Partition Magic or Vista'a own partition utility to shrink/shift partitions to a smaller overall size than the new drive. Then, use "dd" to clone over the drive. After this, you can use a partition utility to expand the partitions to use any extra space.
Now isn't the best time to move to CF cards or SSDs for general use. The size isn't a problem, and nor is the contiguous bandwidth. The problem is with random writes of small data blocks. Flash drives can be simultaneously a hundred times faster than a hard disk at random reads and twenty times slower at certain types of random writes. Contiguous benchmarks like HDTach are misleading.
See here:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.p ... d=23241444
That isn't to say you can't boot from a CF drive, but it requires taking some care in how the system is actually used.
See here:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.p ... d=23241444
That isn't to say you can't boot from a CF drive, but it requires taking some care in how the system is actually used.
Hmm, DDR-2's internal clock cycle shouldn't affect the throughput merely the latencies. Also, SATA2 has overheads of itself, so 5% was a good estimate for single channel.Plekto wrote:Since most memory is really 200mhz internally, and no system runs at a 1:1 memory to fsb ratio of over 200mhz, usually, the actual throughput of most memory is quite a bit less. So SATA 2 is closer to 10% of the ram's speed. (somehow I was converting bits to bytes in the calculations)
Rugged Low Cost Disks
Lowcost rugged portable hard drives fit in your palm, will crash on concrete and still turn back on (look up g-shock ratings).
We followed the advice from this article. Prices have dropped and capacity increased since it ran. WD Passport is just one make.
http://os.newsforge.com/os/06/02/22/2221258.shtml
We put swap on any internal SATA/IDE drives that may exist, or just do without swap, if there's 1 GB RAM or better. Technically you can put the swap on the USB disk but we don't. We move /tmp into tmpfs.
We followed the advice from this article. Prices have dropped and capacity increased since it ran. WD Passport is just one make.
http://os.newsforge.com/os/06/02/22/2221258.shtml
We put swap on any internal SATA/IDE drives that may exist, or just do without swap, if there's 1 GB RAM or better. Technically you can put the swap on the USB disk but we don't. We move /tmp into tmpfs.