RAMDisk

[reven]

anyone ever heard of RAMDisk, or experimented with it? basically it emulates a HDD using RAM so you can allocate 50megs of you RAM as a 50mb hdd. thus greatly improving the speed.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download271.html

you can download a shareware version from the above link. im going to give it a go, installing gbpvr into that RAMDisk so the database and stuff are all there, hopefully it will increase speed, and gbpvr installed is only about 30megs. also when it is shutdownt the ramdisk is saved as an image and that image is loaded when the system starts back up. also i think you can save the image say every 2hours.

interesting, no?

[Pioneer4x4]

My GBPVR dir is 145 meg! The database is 90 meg and the log is 35 meg alone.

[reven]

well then make a ramdisk of say 256megs.

[MaBo]

I've heard that (if you have large memory) you can even make the live-tv buffer on RAM-disk. That reduces HD-load (and thus its temperature), and avoids the permanent flicker of the HD-led. But as the mpegs are large, I think you need >1GB memory free to be really usable. And that is quite costly.

Greetz,
MaBo

[reven]

yeah i wouldnt use if for live tv, but storing the gbpvr database in ram might speed things up a bit, but that said, with my say or 20mins of playing around with it, i didnt like it. i dont think you can change the ramdisk size and keep the info (thus resulting in me having to reinstall gbpvr, again). oh well it was an interesting idea.

[Huw]

you could upgrade to a machine with SATA, it is 6x faster than IDE, and if you stripe 2 drives as a raid 0 array it is 12x faster

[reven]

i have SATA. i just thought it was an interesting idea, and the speed benefits made it worth while investigating.

[Huw]

on a well setup system it shouldn't make that much difference, if you have plenty of ram, most of your active stuff (gbpvr and its data) should be held in memory anyway

[cavemanf16]

Actually, all these different "types" of HDD's don't really matter. The thing you should worry about the most is getting the absolute FASTEST RPM's on a HDD. More revolutions means more data read with each revolution. This is THE limiting factor in how fast memory and the CPU can perform I/O operations on data stored on the HDD. Even if your HDD was running on a SATA and spinning at 7200 rpms you would see it performing at half the speed of a SATA drive spinning at 15000 rpms. (Check the seek times on such drives at Newegg.com - you'll see I'm correct, and seek times are the all important factor in HDD performance)

Why is this so important? Because all of your data cannot be stored on one track on the HDD. Therefore, that seek time is how long it takes to adjust the head to the next track and begin reading data. A 3.4GHz machine is waiting AN ETERNITY every time the HDD has to perform a seek operation to get the first piece of data back from the HDD to perform an instruction. Newegg indicates about a 9ms seek time for 7200rpm SATA drives, while only a 3.9ms seek time for 15000rpm SATA drives.

[hitek146]

About 6 months ago, I posted here(or coulda just spoken to Sub, I don't recall which) about using a RAMDrive for the temporary recording file, because I didn't want my hard drive to shorten it's life because it was constantly writing 24/7. At the time, I set up a 256MB RAMDrive, and pointed my temp directory there. What I found was that, even though the temp file was written to the RAMDisk, my hard drive was still reading or writing every few seconds, just not as much data as it was before. Now I am using a 1GB high-speed SD memory card, and it works awesome... When my temp files are being saved in Divx, then I will be set!!! BTW, they make inexpensive adapters that let you plug a Compact Flash memory card into your IDE cable, and it appers to the system as a hard drive, even if you want to boot off of it....

Hitek
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