Hypothetically speaking...

[Morbid Angel]

Hi Guys,
So I had this thought/idea and I wanted some input on it. With the new SSD's appearing now as our potential future for the replacement of conventional hardd rives, I had this thought that since ssd suppose to be really fast, one could set a very large page file to ssd and potentially use it as a very large ram resource. I could be way off on this one, so I thought i'd throw this out there...

Wouldn't it be totally awesome if you had 100 gb of potential ram. Not that operating system could manage that well, I just cant see that happening but that would be awesome.

[dlparisi]

Just a guess but I'm not sure it would be all that fast. The SSD is still going through the SATA connection which I think is on the order of hundreds of MB per second while DDR2 or DDR3 RAM is operating at several GB per second. That's the first thing that come to mind anyways. Interesting idea though.

[duke2]

Decent discussion here of SSD's:

http://forums.overclockers.com.au/sh...800249&page=18

[Morbid Angel]

yes sata...but there are new ssds out there that are going through pci-e and a much much faster...question remains.

[duke2]

Think you have your answer:

"They do, but you don't really want to use them for this purpose. You are better off with your page file on another drive, or have lots of ram and disabling it altogether.

SSDs have limited write cycles, although it will be years before you get to the limit from what I've read."

[Morbid Angel]

interesting...well I had been in situations where I worked on very fast machines. 8-16 core boxes with 16-32 gb of ram, yet...even there once start to use paging, like in case of mudbox for example, it does not work the same as pure rendering. If you are working with large file in mudbox that can be somewhere between 2-7 gb on disk space any operation with it takes redicules amount of time. And the ram is used sure, but the paging is terribly slow.

[simmsimaging]

I don't really know the hardware at all but someone from Autodesk was talking about these guys and an impressive demo he saw:

http://www.fusionio.com/ioxtreme/

I'm considering one for my Photoshop work - having a high speed scratch disk for Pshop would be huge (and using it as a daily working drive will enormously speed up my saving/opening times too).

b

[Morbid Angel]

yeah exactly what i was thinking initially.

[posterus]

we're actually working on developing a compositing workstation that uses a pci-e ssd from Texas Memory Systems. http://www.superssd.com/products/ramsan-10.htm

the goal being to use the ssd as the media cache. we haven't built it yet but it is in the works. it should make for a killer compositing station. i'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on other apps that might benefit from this technology. i'll be looking for things to benchmark when the system gets built.

[Morbid Angel]

well as explained in the link with ioxtreme, there is a big gap between ram speed and hdd speed thats creating a bottle neck. I have experienced this first hand in many apps like max/maya and also mudbox/zbrush.