- Joined
- Oct 4, 2004
- Location
- Saskatoon, SK
I know I have a thread already about hard drive technology. But Ive thought of a couple possible solutions.
What we will probably eventually move to would be something like current modern day spindle for storage but it would have ram built into it. HDD's are getting cheap and so is ram, its just a matter of time until someone makes something like this. This isnt something right around the corner, but lets say a common drive is a 250gb at this time. I see some sort of cheap ram to be manufactured that will offer transfer rates of atleast a gigabyte per second. Current modern pc3200 is 3.2gbs, so we're not asking much. They will start with 74gb drives, 74gb on the spinder and 74gb of this ram (74, just to pick on the raptor). I think drives would be about $200 to start and be able to walk all over the raptor.
How it will work: The ram will function as normal ram... well normal parity ram (because it will be used so often data is critical to not be messed up), it will get its power from the molex connector that goes into the HDD normally. The same molex connector will power the HDD assembly. And when you turn the system off, the ram is cleared.
On initial startup (during the post process even) the drive will start copying data from the spindle onto the HDD, probably a typical 7200rpm drive, or maybe 10000 by then is common and it will copy the entire hard drive (unless you specify in vista specifically that you dont want these files "cached" on startup. When files arent cached, they will be run from the spindle.
A table of contents of everything on the HDD will be stored in the ram, and it will know what files are cached and which arent, so if it were to access a non cached file, it would spin up the HDD again.
Oh yeah, thats another thing, the HDD will power itself down once its done copying everything to reduce noise/power consumption/wear and tear. It would be recommended to cache all files, and it will be selected by default.
Reading: Anytime a file is to be read it will get it directly from the ram, at a typical 1GB/s transfer rate.
Writing, anytime anything is written it is only written to the ram for speed. When you shut down, restart or on a designated time, the HDD will spin up and copy anything new over. It will know what is new and what isnt so it only copied files that were actually modified and not everything over again.
Also, it will continue copying files over while you are running the system. You can designate a priority for files to be copied over, thus the operating system and all drivers will be set to maximum by default, so during the post process almost your whole OS can be cached and it will actually load off the ram. Priority is a bigt function on it, I suppose it could also be where you select it to not cache. Priority from 0-100, 100 beign cached first regardless, and 0 being do not cache.
You will be required to have a battery backup on your system.
When you restart you can select the option to save cache files or not. Not saving, will restart the OS and not even spin up the drive again, so your restart time will be like <5seconds. And if you chose to save, it will spin the disc up and beging copying files BACK to the spindle during the post process and continue doing it until its done. This wont really have much effect on actual performance of the system so its recommended to always save whenever you can. Reason it wont degrade performance is because the HDD can only copy at <100MB/s and the ram is 10x faster than that. And at most times you wont be asking for 900MB/s or more from your hdd ram anyways.
I dunno, im a little buzzed today but Ive seriously been thinking of what the next hdd tech will be. I dont see why this would be so bad. Using less ram technology will decrease the cost of the chips, and we are only asking for so much bandwidth here anyways from the ram. But imagine system ram accessing your HDD and getting 1GB/s from it loading up a game. Games would load INSTANTLY.
Id pay for technology like this even if it was $450 for 74 gigs. Screw paying for higher clock speeds and faster memory, the HDD is clearly the bottleneck. 2gigs of pc3200 and a p4 3.2ghz will last a fairly long time still if this technology caught on. Any objections?
EDIT: Lets see, your pc3200 memory can have a bandwidth of 3.2GB/s, which is good for talking to the processor and stuff and it can run at its maximum bandwidth and DO 3.2GB/s, but when it needs to access the hdd it is limitd to say 50MB/s so lets say your processor is asking for 3.2GB of data, it will take ~1 minute for it to get that data from the HDD then 1 second to copy it over. So your looking at atleast a minute to access it (for whatever reason), now lets say the HDD only takes 3 seconds to get it there and only 1 second to transfer, thats a 56 second average increase in performance. Thats a 93% difference, equating to a %1600 increase in performance.
EDIT2: And use giant page files to save money on meory because you arent losing much for performance this way
What we will probably eventually move to would be something like current modern day spindle for storage but it would have ram built into it. HDD's are getting cheap and so is ram, its just a matter of time until someone makes something like this. This isnt something right around the corner, but lets say a common drive is a 250gb at this time. I see some sort of cheap ram to be manufactured that will offer transfer rates of atleast a gigabyte per second. Current modern pc3200 is 3.2gbs, so we're not asking much. They will start with 74gb drives, 74gb on the spinder and 74gb of this ram (74, just to pick on the raptor). I think drives would be about $200 to start and be able to walk all over the raptor.
How it will work: The ram will function as normal ram... well normal parity ram (because it will be used so often data is critical to not be messed up), it will get its power from the molex connector that goes into the HDD normally. The same molex connector will power the HDD assembly. And when you turn the system off, the ram is cleared.
On initial startup (during the post process even) the drive will start copying data from the spindle onto the HDD, probably a typical 7200rpm drive, or maybe 10000 by then is common and it will copy the entire hard drive (unless you specify in vista specifically that you dont want these files "cached" on startup. When files arent cached, they will be run from the spindle.
A table of contents of everything on the HDD will be stored in the ram, and it will know what files are cached and which arent, so if it were to access a non cached file, it would spin up the HDD again.
Oh yeah, thats another thing, the HDD will power itself down once its done copying everything to reduce noise/power consumption/wear and tear. It would be recommended to cache all files, and it will be selected by default.
Reading: Anytime a file is to be read it will get it directly from the ram, at a typical 1GB/s transfer rate.
Writing, anytime anything is written it is only written to the ram for speed. When you shut down, restart or on a designated time, the HDD will spin up and copy anything new over. It will know what is new and what isnt so it only copied files that were actually modified and not everything over again.
Also, it will continue copying files over while you are running the system. You can designate a priority for files to be copied over, thus the operating system and all drivers will be set to maximum by default, so during the post process almost your whole OS can be cached and it will actually load off the ram. Priority is a bigt function on it, I suppose it could also be where you select it to not cache. Priority from 0-100, 100 beign cached first regardless, and 0 being do not cache.
You will be required to have a battery backup on your system.
When you restart you can select the option to save cache files or not. Not saving, will restart the OS and not even spin up the drive again, so your restart time will be like <5seconds. And if you chose to save, it will spin the disc up and beging copying files BACK to the spindle during the post process and continue doing it until its done. This wont really have much effect on actual performance of the system so its recommended to always save whenever you can. Reason it wont degrade performance is because the HDD can only copy at <100MB/s and the ram is 10x faster than that. And at most times you wont be asking for 900MB/s or more from your hdd ram anyways.
I dunno, im a little buzzed today but Ive seriously been thinking of what the next hdd tech will be. I dont see why this would be so bad. Using less ram technology will decrease the cost of the chips, and we are only asking for so much bandwidth here anyways from the ram. But imagine system ram accessing your HDD and getting 1GB/s from it loading up a game. Games would load INSTANTLY.
Id pay for technology like this even if it was $450 for 74 gigs. Screw paying for higher clock speeds and faster memory, the HDD is clearly the bottleneck. 2gigs of pc3200 and a p4 3.2ghz will last a fairly long time still if this technology caught on. Any objections?
EDIT: Lets see, your pc3200 memory can have a bandwidth of 3.2GB/s, which is good for talking to the processor and stuff and it can run at its maximum bandwidth and DO 3.2GB/s, but when it needs to access the hdd it is limitd to say 50MB/s so lets say your processor is asking for 3.2GB of data, it will take ~1 minute for it to get that data from the HDD then 1 second to copy it over. So your looking at atleast a minute to access it (for whatever reason), now lets say the HDD only takes 3 seconds to get it there and only 1 second to transfer, thats a 56 second average increase in performance. Thats a 93% difference, equating to a %1600 increase in performance.
EDIT2: And use giant page files to save money on meory because you arent losing much for performance this way
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