Hardware Analysis - XP RAM drive???

Re: XP RAM drive???

Russell Sharpe — 2009-08-11T16:13:00-05:00

There is one way I can think of to get windows to boot from a ram drive. It would have to be a fairly large drive though.
Uninstall your ram drive, and reinstall it as a hard drive, NOT RAM.
It should be given a drive letter, such as D:
Uninstall windows and reinstall it under your "ram drive" which is considered a hard drive by your computer.
Due to the fact that you would no longer have a ram drive CREATE A LARGE PAGING FILE BEFORE YOU DO THIS.
Now, whatever is left on the ram drive you installed windows on, use as a paging file, as this is your boot partition and you need it for dumping files or whatever. You should probably have a small fast external hard drive to use as a paging file to. At least 4 Gigabytes.
Keep in mind it will be very slow and I believe you might not be able to because windows probably takes up more than any ram drive. You may need a ram upgrade to do this.

Re: XP RAM drive???

jon baird — 2009-03-02T19:32:46-05:00

I have a ram drive software. For XP and Vista, Full ver. Ram drive...

just be careful , when setting up ram drive... because XP needs at least 256mb of ram for its self to run, and vista, probley needs 512...

so if you have 4 gigs of ram, you could make 3 gigs of ram drive and leave 1 gig for the os...

if you want the ram drive software... send me your email address?

here is mine. info@renegeek.com / or / renegeek@yahoo.com...

Re: XP RAM drive???

Tarek Wahab — 2009-02-27T21:44:50-05:00

I do have i-RAM from GIGABYTE it cost me around $ 220 with Full Memory (4GB).
And I install XP Pro, But Unforsionatly I end up with 169 MB free space after I install the DRivers and Autocad Software. So this free space I think is not sutable for running fast, it is true Internet is getting very speed But Autocad is som what is not speed as I expect.
Does any one has a Solution.
If Not Can some one gide How to assigne a RAM Drive in My Hard Drive ???
I appreciated.

Re: XP RAM drive???

jon baird — 2008-07-14T08:35:33-05:00

***Starbuck this is for you***

your quote...

Win XP reports 3 GB of Ram when in reality there is 4 GB. I made a 750 MB ramdrive swapfile and the PC is humming along quite nicely. I even picked up some points in some benchmarks. No blue screens, less HDD access. So far I believe that I have achieved what I wanted: more ram used with at least 3 GB for Win XP and programs to play in. I even put my temp files on the ramdrive so I never have to clean them out. I play a lot of memory thirsty games like FEAR and HL2 and not evn a glitch and shorter load times.
--------------------------------

this is my topic on another web site... and have not got the correct answer yet. and you may be the person i'm looking for... See this web site... thanks.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/248014-29-drive-push-limit

This is my ? for you.

right now i have 2gigs, and have set. a 700mb ram drive, with 675min 690max for my swp file. on that ram drive... and its very fast. xp boot time is 16.4 sec.

now, my ? is, if i get 2 more gigs. =4gigs. and set a 2gig ram drive, and set SWP 1950min 1995max for the swp. (will the OS, get the other 2gigs, or will it still be only 1gig, because of the winXP 32bit issue...

i hope this is not comfuseing... if so, please let me know...

your the only person in here, that seems to know what your doing... , of what i''m trying to do.. and such...

i love tweaking the s**t out of my pc, with little money... and make my pc screem...

hope to hear from ya...

thanks to all. (everybody has great advice... thanks.)

Re: XP RAM drive???

jon baird — 2008-07-13T07:17:02-05:00

Ram drive is not retarded... it works wonders... very fast...

I did it... check this out... to all of you... http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/248014-29-drive-push-limit

if you want a good driver for a ram drive... let me know... i can direct you in the right direction... you can have as much as you would like ... up to as much as ram you have... sugesstion: 2gigs, set about 700mb for ram drive. and set SWP file to that drive letter.

***Renegeek Computers***
http://www.renegeek.com
info@renegeek.com

Re: XP RAM drive???

john albrich — 2008-03-02T05:51:31-05:00

shuja rahman said:

What is RAM drive,,,is it a sort of Virtual memory.

OFCOL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramdrive

Re: XP RAM drive???

shuja rahman — 2008-03-02T05:29:26-05:00

What is RAM drive,,,is it a sort of Virtual memory.

Re: XP RAM drive???

Starbuck — 2008-03-02T02:49:07-05:00

My PC still shows 3 GB of RAM on the general properties tab even though I have 4 (2 GB in slot 0 and 2 GB in slot 1). Numerically, 32 bit XP can see all 4 Gig. I just read that XP subtracts 1 GB of RAM for strictly system purposes. I'm not sure if it's true but it's comfortin'. It also shows about 1.4 gig pagefile under performance in Task Manager except that there is only the one file of pagefile.sys on the Ramdrive so no idea what that's about. Rig runs great and the ramdrive seems to be working so I'm happy.

Starbuck52

Re: XP RAM drive???

Tech — 2008-03-02T00:44:58-05:00

My thanks go to Arquero and Starbuck for addressing the (non-)use of the full 4GB of RAM. In reply to this last message, I wanted to ask whether your machine is actually using the unused RAM, since in my machine, the 768MB RAM drive comes out of the 3.2GB RAM I started out with... That does not help me much. Should I use any specific settings in the registry to use the unused higher RAM between 3.2 and 4.0 GB?

You help is (once again) much appreciated!

Tech

Re: XP RAM drive???

Starbuck — 2008-02-01T19:53:51-05:00

As stated, my Win XP reports 3 GB of Ram when in reality there is 4 GB. I made a 750 MB ramdrive swapfile and the PC is humming along quite nicely. I even picked up some points in some benchmarks. No blue screens, less HDD access. So far I believe that I have achieved what I wanted: more ram used with at least 3 GB for Win XP and programs to play in. I even put my temp files on the ramdrive so I never have to clean them out. I play a lot of memory thirsty games like FEAR and HL2 and not evn a glitch and shorter load times.

The testing continues but so far I couldn't be happier.

Starbuck

Re: XP RAM drive???

Arquero — 2008-02-01T18:03:58-05:00

A Lucas said:

Arquero said:

I thought AMD's 64-bit CPUs would force Intel to follow suit and make 64-bit mainstream. This just didn't happen.

You are joking. right? You wrote this in Dec 2007 and you are saying that Intel has not made 64-bit mainstream? What do you think a Core 2 Duo is??? A 64-bit dual core processor made by Intel based on the Intel x86 architecture and has been in use by computer manufacturers for over a year. Apple's OS X and Microsoft's XP 64-bit, Vista 64-bit, Server 2003, and Server 2008 run on the Intel 64-bit Core 2 Duos, Core 2 Quads, and Xeon multiple core processors.

Before you open your mouth, do a little research.

I think you horribly misunderstood me, and I don't like to me misquoted out of context. 'I thought' signifies past tense. These computers were built years ago back when AMD had the edge on CPUs (before Core 2 Duo). I thought that Intel would follow suit much sooner than they did as I also thought the rest of the market would. If you read earlier posts I have used WinXPx64. And I will say it again...

There is one program that has a USBKey that does not like WinXPx64, otherwise I would have used it when I built the computer.

And if you read my previous posts... I have 4GB, but I am limited to WinXP Pro 32-bit. If you do some research (or just read previous posts) you'll see the problem. WinXP 32-bit only recognizes a maximum of 2.75GB. But even with that setting, I have some performance issues, so I have been forced to bring it down to 2GB. I'll do the math for you... 2GB is now wasted, sitting in my computer collecting dust. That's half! Now, if I can't use that RAM as standard RAM, would not using it as a pagefile (emulating a HD) be the next best thing? I'm not giving up precious RAM as I cannot utilize it anyways. The pagefile is basically emulating RAM. Do you see where I am going with this? Obviously not so I'll spit it out for you:

I want to utilize the 2GB that WinXP Pro 32-bit refuses to as the pagefile. Since I have applications that will use more than the 2GB I have, I am forced to use the pagefile system anyways.

To quote a member of this site:
Before you open your mouth, do a little research.

Also, please refrain from useless posts that do not advance the subject.

For my contribution, I will try that program that Starbuck has suggested. I will also try yet again to see if the most recent driver for that USBKey will now work in WinXP Prox64.

Arquero

Re: XP RAM drive???

john albrich — 2008-01-30T21:04:10-05:00

Starbuck said:

...You would think that something with no moving parts would be almost infinite but not so.....

What's insidious is that manufacturers don't emphasize the limitations (for obvious reasons) so one could even today get stuck with a FLASH drive that uses the older memory technology limited to something on the order of 10,000 (10^4) erase/write cycles. Even the better memory in use is often spec'd at 1,000,000 (10^6) cycles before failures begin to occur.

A real risk is that the memory failures can be undetectable. If you're using a FLASH drive for critical data you may suddenly find unexplained random errors (if you even detect them) showing up in your results. Debugging such errors can lead down the wrong path if you don't know about this vulnerability. I would not trust critical financial or health data to NVRAM without some independent means of verifying the data.

I would like to see multi-bit error detection and correction circuitry implemented in FLASH drives.

In digital camera images, these errors might show up in photos as unexplained "artifacts", if the error even results in a visible difference. I would imagine it often only shows up as a very slight variation in color in a given pixel...one that might not even be noticed in a 5mp resolution image.

Of course, the impact of even a single-bit error in a Windows cache or swapfile of a computer could result in some rather spectacular system failures.

Re: XP RAM drive???

Starbuck — 2008-01-30T20:38:26-05:00

Funny, in all of my research I found that the USB "SpeedBoost" has that finite number of writes to it. It was a surprise to me. You would think that something with no moving parts would be almost infinite but not so. I also have a sizable UPS on my system and it comes in handy far more often than I'd like. Power glitches etc..

Starbuck

Re: XP RAM drive???

john albrich — 2008-01-30T19:59:26-05:00

Starbuck said:

If a RAMdrive uses Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM) then there are two main issues:
1) NVRAM is a LOT slower than volatile RAM.
2) NVRAM has a finite write-cycle limit. While this is higher than it used to be even a few years ago, it is still finite and using NVRAM for a system disk will result in very accelerated device failure.

As for the booting issue...
I'm willing to put up with the extremely infrequent need to re-load the RAMdrive with a backup image of the system disk (what I name as a "hard-restore") in order to eliminate the cost of an on-card battery back-up system. That removes ANY excuse to make the RAMdrive card more expensive than a normal disk controller card.

My primary system UPS provides at least 30 minutes of off-mains operation. This is more than enough power to permit an image of the RAMdrive to be copied to a hard disk so that I could recover to a controlled point the RAMdrive was at during the power failure scenario.

A RAMdrive hard-restore and re-boot is ONLY required if mains power wasn't restored before the UPS was depleted. It's ONLY at those instances that force an unplanned re-boot from a complete 100% power-off state that would require first re-loading the RAMdrive from a hard disk image and then re-booting off the RAMdrive. Such an unplanned situation would occur perhaps once every couple of years. Other instances would occur only if I have to power off 100% to change the system hardware configuration or for planned power-off maintenance. All other re-boots would be from the RAMdrive because power would have never been removed from the RAM, and memory would remain intact. The entire recovery sequence could be automated.

edited-to further clarify a couple of points

edit to add--BTW, even with on-card battery backup, you're going to need a "hard-restore" mechanism of some kind in place anyway, so this isn't adding a lot to the environment. Any on-card battery power sub-system may fail, become depleted, or need to be regularly replaced at some point for preventive maintenance. A "hard-restore" capability will be required at those times. Further, if an on-card battery power-subsystem is required for data integrity, it actually reduces system reliability by adding more possible critical path failure points to the system.

Re: XP RAM drive???

Starbuck — 2008-01-30T17:57:12-05:00

Those RAM cards are loaded with the Operating System which is either backed up by battery or is non-volatile ram which is why they boot so fast. If, on bootup the hard drive has to be accessed to load the OS then there is no fast boot. I thought about getting one but just the card is so expensive! I have the RAM to fill it (DDR PC 2700) but since they are the only card makers they ask an exorbitant price. Hopefully somebody will also start making the cards. I looked at my Win XP folder and we would need 4 GB of ram to hold it. I have no idea how big Vista is but I'm sure it is bigger. For now I'm just happy with a ram swapfile so my hard drive is rarely accessed during operations. The price is right too.

Starbuck