SSD V Ramdrive

Playing around with this 40 gig Corsair SSD and it ain't too bad but I still use a ramdrive where I run all of FF from, store Sandboxie's working folder and run two nLited XP VM's from there as well.

The 3.8 gig ramdrive is loaded from a saved iso at boot which slows startup a little bit but I use mainly sleep anyways.

SSD read speeds:


Ramdrive:

 

Franklin, I was about to comment on the inherent reasons why a SATA interface based SSD can not compete against a Ramdrive, but I was distracted by the strange transfer speed as displayed by the HDtune for your SSD. There is something wrong, the read curve should be almost a flat horizontal line centered around the advertised read speed of your model. Your SSD is fluctuating between 100 Mb/s and 220 MB/s. I seem to recall sometime ago there was a problem with the firmware of the corsair SSD drives that prevented them from reaching their maximum transfer rates. Are you using the updated firmware? If you are then there is something else going on as a SSD should give you a almost constant read speed.

 

Dunno but I was having a bit of strife with full system virtualization and trim enabled so turned off trim and data corruption probs seem to be gone.

The bios is set to ide not AHCI as well?

Thanks for pointing that out as I had seen other SSD's read speeds and they sit at a much flatter line as stated by you. Will look at updating the firmware which I haven't looked at as yet.

 

Trim is most likely the culprit here. Disabling it will cause performance fluctuations on your SSD. Some parts will perform poorly while others will perform better. If you want to keep Trim disabled you should run the manufacturer's supplied utility on your SSD often. This will remove the fluctuations in the read/write transfer rate.

 

Thanks Raza0007, you seem to know quite a bit about these SSD's.

Must be that I have trim turned off as I updated the firmware and it didn't seem to make a difference.

Corsair Forum

 

I gathered from your 3rd post that you had turned off trim as it was causing problems for your Virtualization. Trim is only supported in Windows 7. So if you are on XP or Vista then you need either the manufacturer's supplied utility or a third party utility to do the job that trim would have done. I do not know whether Corsair supplies any such utility, but I will do a search and find out if there is a good 3rd party utility that can work for you.

 

Not sure the point of this thread. Setting aside your Trim issues for the moment, were you expecting SSD performance to be better than or equal to a RAM Disk? There's no way that can happen until SS RAM of the SSD can be connected directly to the motherboard's bus - and that's called system RAM.

 

Franklin if the ramdisk is 3.8g then I presume you are talking about software?..than say a volatile sata ramdrive - which one do you use?

 

I believe Franklin's idea was a discussion between the speed of the Ramdrive and a SSD, but the discussion got a little sidetracked by the fact that his SSD Corsair CSSD-F40GB2 is rated at 280 Mb/s read and 270 Mb/s write speed but he is only getting about 100 Mb/s read speed as displayed in HDTune. I believe it is because TRIM is not being used. If Franklin is not using windows 7 then he needs some third party utility to get his expensive investment back to full performance.

 

On Win 7 here and I'm not really too worried about having trim turned off as I prefer the full system virtualization to work without probs.

Most read/writes happen via the ramdrive so I'm happy with that.

The point of this thread is probably just another forum discussion, maybe pointless, maybe not.

No I didn't expect the SSD to be as fast as a ramdrive and posted as it might be of interest to those that have an SSD or contemplating buying one.

Actually glad I started this thread as I learnt a bit myself thanks to Raza0007.

 

Well then, all you need to do to get max performance from your SSD is to enable TRIM in Windows 7 and in BIOS switch the controller to AHCI. Now whether you want to do this or not is entirely up to you.

Glad to be of service.

 

No problem. I was just wondering. Some folks compare SSD performance to a RAM disk, thinking they should be similar. But really, that's comparing apples to oranges.

 

Sorry Meriadoc, missed your post yesterday.

If you have 8 gig of ram the ramdrive utility below can create and use the upper 4 gig of ram that Win 7 32 bit can't use.

Here I first created the ramdrive as fat 32 then formatted it to ntfs which seems to have slightly better read/write speeds that fat 32 and exFat.

After I have set it up the way I want then I save an iso of it to another partition which is loaded at boot and which slows boot a bit.

Dataram Ramdrive

 

Thanks Franklin, yes I know it.

 

i was looking into getting a SSD (probably an Intel) but my mobo doesn't support AHCI (for TRIM).

my computer is 3 years old and i wasn't planning to change it for another couple of years.

does TRIM makes that much difference on an Intel?
if yes, should i get something other than Intel?

 

I believe you misunderstood me. AHCI is not needed for TRIM to work. For TRIM you just need an OS that supports TRIM like Win 7. AHCI is needed for getting max performance out of your SSD.

Just make sure any SSD you purchase supports TRIM. Older versions of some SSD do not support TRIM.

 

Tnx Raza!

does AHCI makes that much of a difference?
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edit:

never mind.
i think i will wait another couple of years before upgrading.

 

WOW Ram drive?

I never knew something like that existed!
You never stop learning things on Wilders maaan!

 

Actually, RAM drives, or RAM disks have been around for decades, long before the personal computer. They were popular with the Commodore 64.

 

And i though i "knew" about computers
Guess i'm still young
Anyways, i always though if it was possible to use ram as an HDD since it's memory but i never researched about it

 

Ha! I've been working with computers ever since I stood inside one that took up the whole 3rd floor of a NORAD block house in the mid-70's. If there is anything to learn from 4 decades of experience, it is that there is always much more to learn. The IT industry is made up of many industries. It is impossible for any one person know anywhere near all of it.

 

Actually, I'd really like to know the answer to this. Raza, is this a significant difference maker, and will there be problems if one's M/board doesn't have this feature?

 

Most manufacturers recommend using AHCI with SSD for optimal performance. Here is what Corsair has to say in its FAQs about AHCI (see SSD Related FAQs).

Without AHCI you can not use certain advanced features in SATA drives like native command queuing NCQ and hotplug.

Read this benchmark for AHCI vs IDE performance

With latest SSD's, especially those using the latest sandforce controllers, the performance difference between AHCI and IDE is significant. So, to get max performance out of your SSD you should definitely upgrade to AHCI.

 

Thank you for your help and info, Raza Some noticeable differences for sure. At least I won't require hot plug or RAID functionality if I do upgrade my h/drive to SSD. I'm looking seriously at the OCZ Vertex 2 SATA II 120GB.

 

Wow, lots of experience there man!

I just read your MVP Profile xD
What a good read, lots of history in there