| Reverse "RAM drive" from an SSD? Guys I just landed a new gig and I'm afraid I'm getting over my head. I've been tasked with taking an older server that only has about 32G of RAM available and plugging in some SSDs to create more system memory. I know about pagefile and stuff but this is virtual memory and with SSDs being so much faster I'm thinking I could move my pagefile to these SSDs and then up the pagefile size to say 64G and boom more memory where I got 96G of RAM. The problem I am having is that I am not sure how I need to format these if I need to do FAT32 or NTFS?
This seems like an awesome idea really to get more RAM from a box since an SSD is just as fast and SO MUCH CHEAPER than say adding another 64G of RAM that I know some servers won't support.
Can anyone advise? Anyone done this?
Cheers from over the pond,
Patrick |
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Vinch
join:2007-10-24
Pointe-Claire, QC | Well, it'll never be as fast as RAM. Will it be fast enough? Maybe, but it really depends on what you're trying to do.
Hopefully you know that SSDs have finite number of writes before they die. Using them for a pagefile on a busy server will probably kill them in short order. You will definitively want to get enterprise-grade SSDs but price might be similar to the cost of RAM by the time you're done.
If it were my rig, I wouldn't do it.
Good luck!
To answer your question, you would want to format in NTFS as FAT32 has a limit of 4GB per file. |
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 freezeI'm not even GreekPremium
join:2001-05-13
Ohio
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to PatrickE
In general...
Older generation PC2-8500 RAM - Max theoretical transfer rate of 8,500 MB/sec
Corsair M4 256GB SSD - Real world speeds of ~400 MB/sec
Quality SSD's are faster than traditional hard disk counterparts... but they aren't direct RAM substitutes. |
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| reply to PatrickE
I would advise against what you are suggesting. Like Vinch said, you are going to kill those SSD drives pretty quick, even if they are SLCs.
From a performance standpoint, you would need to stack quite a few SSDs together in a RAID0 to even come near RAM performance. At that point you might as well purchase a new server that can handle the RAM requirements.
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How lucky am I to have known someone who is so hard to say good-bye to. |
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 KoolMoeAw ManPremium
join:2001-02-14
Annapolis, MD | reply to PatrickE
Some thoughts from MS on this:
»blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009···and.aspx
Agreed overall it likely isn't a good long-term solution. However, a RAM-based SSD may be a good alternative. No data retention with power-failure, but it's a swap drive, so no problem, right?
»www.storagesearch.com/ssd-ram.html
(see sidebar there for options)
and another:
»www.engadget.com/2009/05/05/ddrd···-costly/
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Don't Lie - Be Kind - Realize your Potential |
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