16GB installed, only 12GB usable in Win7 x64 Ultimate

[doveman]

I tried making a 400MB RAMdisk using awealloc - imdisk -a -f \\.\awealloc -s 400M -m S: -p "/fs:ntfs /q /y"

As you can see from the CDM results, it's much slower:

[jaclaz]

I tried making a 400MB RAMdisk using awealloc - imdisk -a -f \\.\awealloc -s 400M -m S: -p "/fs:ntfs /q /y"

As you can see from the CDM results, it's much slower:

This makes little sense.

400 Mb is NOT a "biggish"disk size, you were talking till now of a several Gb one.

IMHO what you should try is making a disk of the size you need it using IMDISK "native" allocation and test it in both ATTO and CDM, then make another disk of the same size using awealloc and test it with both ATTO and CDM, then disregard BOTH results of BOTH benchmarks and simply try running that game with one and the other method and choose the one that "feels" better (if a difference can be felt) pr that results more stable.

I presume that if the Author of the tool says:

The various memory access/allocation methods are good for different things. It is quite expected that measured performance will differ a lot. But my general opinion is that for memory backed virtual disks, there is no good reason to use internal ImDisk allocation for disks larger than, say 100-200 MB or so. Awealloc should really be used instead.

it is very likely that there are reasons...

jaclaz

Edited October 10, 2012 by jaclaz

[doveman]

I tried making a 400MB RAMdisk using awealloc - imdisk -a -f \\.\awealloc -s 400M -m S: -p "/fs:ntfs /q /y"

As you can see from the CDM results, it's much slower:

This makes little sense.

400 Mb is NOT a "biggish"disk size, you were talking till now of a several Gb one.

IMHO what you should try is making a disk of the size you need it using IMDISK "native" allocation and test it in both ATTO and CDM, then make another disk of the same size using awealloc and test it with both ATTO and CDM, then disregard BOTH results of BOTH benchmarks and simply try running that game with one and the other method and choose the one that "feels" better (if a difference can be felt) pr that results more stable.

Well Raymond's tests were done with a 512MB RAMdisk and he got good speeds, so it seemed reasonable. Just for you , I've done the CDM and ATTO tests with a 10GB awealloc RAMdisk and as I expected, it's just as slow (ATTO and CDM results for 10GB non-awealloc RAMdisk are in posts #20 (RAMdisk Enterprise) and #25 (IMDisk, only CDM but sufficient to show it's slower than RAMDisk Enterprise and faster than awealloc))

It's still many times faster than HDD and three times faster than SSD though, so plenty fast enough to rule out slow data streaming as being the cause of any stuttering. I've now tested DCS World from HDD, IMDisk and awealloc and I get the same stuttering with all three, so obviously that's not the problem.

I presume that if the Author of the tool says:

The various memory access/allocation methods are good for different things. It is quite expected that measured performance will differ a lot. But my general opinion is that for memory backed virtual disks, there is no good reason to use internal ImDisk allocation for disks larger than, say 100-200 MB or so. Awealloc should really be used instead.

it is very likely that there are reasons...

Well yes, as I said IMDisks can end up paged to the swapfile on the HDD, which rather defeats the purpose of a RAMdisk, so that's a good reason

[doveman]

There's a new version of SoftPerfect RAMDisk available now which fixes the problems I was having before.

Speeds look good. FAT32 is a bit faster than NTFS but I think that's normal because of NTFS' overheads. I just need to confirm that it prevents any of the RAM used being paged out, like awealloc.

[doveman]

Well running ArmAII from my 11000MB RAMDisk was working fine but now it's started randomly locking up the entire PC, requiring a hard reset.

It happened with SoftPerfect, which I've been using for ages but I've moved away from that now as a) it annoyed me that it auto-mounted the last mounted RAMDisk when starting the app after a reboot and b) it started throwing up errors and failing to mount RAMdisks anyway.

So I'm using Primo RAMdisk at the moment but I ran through one of the benchmark scenarios in ArmAII a few times, until the last time when it locked up the PC again. After that I ran from HDD and it didn't lock up at all.

I could try IMdisk awealloc again, I'm not sure if I've tried that since experiencing these lockups. It's a lot slower than the other apps but still twice as fast as a SSD.

Note I'm still running at the BIOS defaults I think, certainly CPU-Z shows NB 2000MHZ, DRAM Freq 666.7Mhz, 9-9-9-24-34-2T. The voltage is probably at default 1.5v as well. Might I need to boost that slightly for 16GB and if so, what should I boost it to or should I loosen the timings instead?

Edited November 25, 2012 by doveman

[doveman]

I ran Memtest overnight and that completed two passes no errors.

Any ideas why using the RAMdisk is causing my PC to lockup?