ssd's as ram??

[tilleroftheearth]

I gotta disagree with you here. I think you are SEVERELY exaggerating the fact that NAND chips have limited write cycles.

The situation you mention (single-chip, single-channel NAND chip) never happens. Nobody engineers a drive like that. It is a contrived scenario specifically intended to demonstrate how to kill a NAND chip as fast as possible. I could easily come up with an equally ridiculous and unrealistic scenario talking about how mechanical hard drives are horrible, because they die within minutes if you put them in an oven or repeatedly drop them onto concrete.

SSD's have been out for a while now. I challenge you to name ONE case, or find ONE thread on the internet discussing how an SSD hit its write cycle limit, and became a read-only drive... not a discussion on theoretical limits, and not a situation where the entire drive died for some unknown reason like all computer hardware has tendencies to do. Can you find an actual confirmed and documented case where the drive was used as it was intended to be used, the NAND chips hit their limit on the number of allowable writes, and reverted to a read-only mode?

I don't think you're following the conversation here...

The Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid has a single chip, single channel nand device with no overprovisioning included in it's spec's.

And, search for the G1 Intel's that, when used in the wrong scenarios, died in a matter of weeks.


No, I am not exaggerating about this at all.

[kent1146]

kent
thanks for you observations re the bad ram etc, but dont game textures load to the discrete gpu's ram and not actual system ram?

Perhaps it isn't loading textures, then... perhaps it is loading game assets, or models, or somethign else.

Regardless of WHAT it is loading, I can definitively say that a pagefile running on an SSD is no replacement for true RAM.

[trvelbug]

Perhaps it isn't loading textures, then... perhaps it is loading game assets, or models, or somethign else.

Regardless of WHAT it is loading, I can definitively say that a pagefile running on an SSD is no replacement for true RAM.

thanks kent. thats the most definitive real world answer ive gotten so far, although it isnt a perfect assessment since the damaged ram could be adding as much to the sluggishness as the pagefile access itself.

[kent1146]

thanks kent. thats the most definitive real world answer ive gotten so far, although it isnt a perfect assessment since the damaged ram could be adding as much to the sluggishness as the pagefile access itself.

Well, I took the damaged RAM out. The RAM I have in the system right now has passed about 7 straight hours of MemTest86+ without error. Since my desktop is just a regular desktop system, I'm using non-ECC RAM. If the RAM was bad, then it would simply freeze up or crash my system. It would not correct itself with a performance penalty.

I see that you're running a Seagate Momentus XT. That isn't all that much slower than an SSD. If you want to see how your system reacts to paging out to disk, then just remove 2GB of RAM from your system and run off of your remaining 2GB. Paging to a Seagate Momentus XT may be better than a 7200rpm mechanical hard drive, but it is still going to be painfully slow compared to having true physical RAM. Having a real SSD may be slightly better than your Momentus XT, but it's still going to be noticeably slow when paging.

Once I experienced this, I quickly remembered why I came up with a rule several years ago that I will always have enough physical RAM in my system to the point where I never page out to disk.

[trvelbug]

Well, I took the damaged RAM out. The RAM I have in the system right now has passed about 7 straight hours of MemTest86+ without error. Since my desktop is just a regular desktop system, I'm using non-ECC RAM. If the RAM was bad, then it would simply freeze up or crash my system. It would not correct itself with a performance penalty.

I see that you're running a Seagate Momentus XT. That isn't all that much slower than an SSD. If you want to see how your system reacts to paging out to disk, then just remove 2GB of RAM from your system and run off of your remaining 2GB. Paging to a Seagate Momentus XT may be better than a 7200rpm mechanical hard drive, but it is still going to be painfully slow compared to having true physical RAM. Having a real SSD may be slightly better than your Momentus XT, but it's still going to be noticeably slow when paging.

Once I experienced this, I quickly remembered why I came up with a rule several years ago that I will always have enough physical RAM in my system to the point where I never page out to disk.

yes actually thats where the discussion with tiller started from. with my momentus xt my ram previews and renders are much faster.
my contention was that the pagefile (or at least a large part of it) was cached in the NAND, since nothing else had changed in my system except an opengl adobe update - but that should not have affected my ram previews.
the point is moot however since i caved in and ordered 8gig ram. hopefully i get to sell my 4gig to recoup some of the cost.