BF2S Forums Is anybody using a RAMDRIVE?

Actually I have two... on 39320 and a 29160 both are older boards but they work great, unforunately they are both AGP.

My actual work system a MSI K7D-Master dual socket a with dual Barton mobiles running at 2.4G, 3.5G ECC memory the 39320 running one 72G 15K fugitsi (?SP?) drive on one channel and a 36G 10K segate on the other for storage. It has a 64/66 interface with AGP Pro. Unfortunately the memory is slow compared to dual channel or I'd be using it as my gaming rig.

My gaming machine is a MSI K7 something ILSR, its also AGP, the bus runs at 32/33 but that's basically 133 MB/s so one 72G 15K Fugjusti never saturates it. (although the manual says it will support 64/33)

You don't nessarily need 64/100 or 64/66 to support those cards they are backwards compatable to 32/33. Unless your going to raid the scsi's or run two disks you don't really need more than 32/33.

Iwill and Tyan make a few board that support both PCI-x and PCi-e but you'll have to run 2XX oppies. That will probably be my next machine.

@chewy, yeah pain in the butt yup but isn't that pretty much what your doing?

Only problem with the solid state is the cycle life I also heard writing is quite slow. But your certainly correct what would access time be? <6ns?? never need to defragement. Actually it would probably be benifitial to fragment to cut down on localized heat issues.

Last I heard it was about 10^6 which sounds like alot but... but considering the reasons for purchse, i.e. latency access times etc. If you rewrote one "block" every second that "block" would have a 95% chance of failing in a month, with an average failure rate around a 11 days. If you could improve the write cycles to 10^7, and somehow had some type of sequential block writing where your not reusing the first part of the drive over and over again. You might get a year out of it, but I wouldn't trust it beyond a few months. (This is only considering write re-write, for simple read-only only they will last a while).

topal63 wrote:

One other idea - is the possibilty of configuring 2 iRAMs (which works on the standard SATA controlller) into a merged raid 0 configuration. This would increase the max capacity to 8 gigs.

An additional install of windows (minimal) + bf2 could be installed on this - if a raid 0 config is stable with 2 merged iRAM drives.
This would eliminate the problem with C:\My documents containing the optimized shader files.
I think I might experiment and try this out.

I was thinking along the same lines as Topal, except for the RAID 0 using iRAM drives (solid state error rate is higher than Magnetic media, so you would quickly have corrupted data in your Raid 0 drive).

You can remap the My Documents folder to be on the iRAM drive, along with the BF2 directory, and your virtual memory swap file (even if you have 2GB~4GB of system memory, this is a good idea). This would optimize your hard disk load times for getting into the game.

It will not assist your systems GPU load time however (Rendering). This is still based on your video card, and the amount of memory being utilized on your video card (BF2 doesn't recognize 512MB video ram, so stick with 256mb cards).

I just bought a Plasma screen for the house, and my car is acting up, so I can't test this right now, but I'll try this out in a month or so, just to log the load times.

If anyone else has this config, and is willing to try it, the best test is to load a slow map (64P Surge in SF is a good pick), until you get the join game button, disconnect, then load the same map again (same server if possible) this would give you the load time, plus the reload times for the slowest map. Repeat using a fast loading map (16 player Karkand) to show the differences.

In theory, this config should rip through a 4x 150GB Raptor Raid 0 config for speed.
(would cost less than the 4 raptors too!)

That sounds weird...

I'd check for two things, first go into the 29160 Bios options and make sure your running at 160Mb/s.

Second check that the cable is terminated, IMHO I think the issue lies in the interface. For some reason it's limiting you back to wide SCSI 40Mb/s bandwidth.

Yes your load times won't change much since you still have a decent access time, but wow 36mb/s?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

One more thing that just dawned on me. Doesn't the 29160 have two 68-pin interfaces? I think one will only give you  40MB/s, it's for running cd-rom or tape something like that. Where the other is the 160Mb/s connection.

I believe the LVD connector is the one closes to the mounting screw, make sure the cable is plugged in there. You might have removed the cable during the ram installation and put it back on the wrong connector, I've done that one before.