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snaggs

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 27, 2003
5
0
I know there are plenty of these available for the PC. Anybody know of a manufacturer on the Mac ?

With Ram prices so cheep, the perfect compliment to a G5 is a 2gb Ram disk for you OS and Apps install ;)

Daniel.
 

daveg5

macrumors 6502a
Nov 28, 2001
741
0
just use system ram

use the system ram for an even faster ram disk, there are utilities just for this and with the great bandwith wow
of course you might want to wait for panther and the utilities to have it fully 64 bit optimized. and would not that be cheaper then pcix ram disk and use less power and keep that slot open for better airflow?
 

snaggs

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 27, 2003
5
0
I'd rather have something that boots in 1 second and is non-volatile. SWare ram disks have to write themselves out to h/disk.
 

daveg5

macrumors 6502a
Nov 28, 2001
741
0
ok

Originally posted by snaggs
I'd rather have something that boots in 1 second and is non-volatile. SWare ram disks have to write themselves out to h/disk.
point well taken but osx is so stable and system ram would be faster then pcix ram, and i am sure the g5 boot rather quickly the pcix ram would take more than 1 second if it is 1-10 seconds i am interested also.
then it makes good since
 

iJon

macrumors 604
Feb 7, 2002
6,586
229
hell g4's but up extremly quick as well. panther speeds it up too. i wonder if a g5 boots up quicker or slower.

iJon
 

snaggs

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 27, 2003
5
0
Pretty damn quick! Have a look at

http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm

This is a farily inexpensive SSD (Solid State Disk). I'm just reading up on OSX device drivers. I've never done unix device drivers before, but it doesn't sound too hard.

Anybody have any experience with OS X device drivers ?

Daniel.
 

daveg5

macrumors 6502a
Nov 28, 2001
741
0
Originally posted by snaggs
Pretty damn quick! Have a look at

http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm

This is a farily inexpensive SSD (Solid State Disk). I'm just reading up on OSX device drivers. I've never done unix device drivers before, but it doesn't sound too hard.

Anybody have any experience with OS X device drivers ?
ouch 4gb model cost $3600 with no osx soft ware thats another g5 dual or 30 cinema display i will wait the full 60 secons startup time
Daniel.
 

snaggs

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 27, 2003
5
0
Yeh, but why buy it populated with their ram ? Its available without ram for $590, just uses standard PC133 SDRAM.... not exactly expensive.
 

daveg5

macrumors 6502a
Nov 28, 2001
741
0
Originally posted by snaggs
Yeh, but why buy it populated with their ram ? Its available without ram for $590, just uses standard PC133 SDRAM.... not exactly expensive.
i did not know that, however i am assuming that panther will need more then 4GB space.
do they have an 8GB model?
if the g5 boots under 60 seconds then it might not be needed, bur i think it will speed up the desktop a lot and launch all apps instantly whisch is cool but yoou will need 8GB to be safe and some osx software.
 

MacBandit

macrumors 604
Why turn your system off? Just boot it up and load all your programs you regularly use and then leave it on. Put it to sleep when you don't want it on and then wake it up when you want it. The programs sitting in the background will not affect your system speed at all and they will not affect stability at all either.

If you absolutely must shut your computer off here's some info on boot time. My Dual/GHz/DDR PowerMac boots to login in 36secs from login to useable finder is 4secs. Starting most apps is 1-2secs at the most. I would expect a Dual 2GHz G5 with Panther to be quite a bit faster then that with the right hard drive.
 

Porshuh944turbo

macrumors 6502
Jun 4, 2003
261
0
I would think 2GB would be minimum... But.. how much faster are we talking? Sure an increase in boot time, but for normal use?

If you load down a new G5 with, say 4GB RAM, you shouldn't have ANY page outs, which means, you're already running off of System RAM (much faster PC3200) so what would you gain????
 

MisterMe

macrumors G4
Jul 17, 2002
10,709
69
USA
Originally posted by Porshuh944turbo
I would think 2GB would be minimum... But.. how much faster are we talking? Sure an increase in boot time, but for normal use?

If you load down a new G5 with, say 4GB RAM, you shouldn't have ANY page outs, which means, you're already running off of System RAM (much faster PC3200) so what would you gain????
Don't get me wrong--the only thing wrong with more RAM is that it costs money. However, your new PowerMac G5 will work great with 512 MB.
 

MacBandit

macrumors 604
Originally posted by MisterMe
Don't get me wrong--the only thing wrong with more RAM is that it costs money. However, your new PowerMac G5 will work great with 512 MB.

We're talking about a RAM disk not system ram. A physical RAM disk not software ram disk. As stated above though I think there is no reason for this sort of thing especially on the new PowerMacs. I don't think there will be a noticeable speed difference.
 

daveg5

macrumors 6502a
Nov 28, 2001
741
0
the only diff would be anything that uses the harddrive tranfered to ram disk would be instant and that includes everything. i am guessing bootup would be under 5 seconds. and unlike harddrives which fluctuate wildly in transfer rate you are guaranteed 100MBS always and at all time no deviation.since just about evrything you do in osx access the hard drive and memry all the time, taking the harddrive completely out of the picture will spped up everything by quite a bit your hard drive would be sleep unless you decide to access it for storage at the end of the day.
problem pcixram disk at 4GB seems to small to me should be at least 8, my system and app drive has almost 6gb on iy already, price too high.
i tried once to load my system folder and apps in os9 into a ram disk that saved to regular disk at every hour. well i can say that everything just zoomed much faster then slowed to a crawl when ever it had to write to disk but it was fun opening apps, game s etc, that fast.
http://www.clarkswoodsoftware.com the osx version has virtually no features compared to the os9 version but they are still working on it,
 

Makosuke

macrumors 604
Aug 15, 2001
6,661
1,242
The Cool Part of CA, USA
It'd be very cool if you could get one of these things to run in your G5. But thinking realistically, is it really worth the tremendous cost for anything past bragging rights?

For one, I agree (as a non-expert, admittedly) that once the majority of the OS is preloaded into memory, there wouldn't be a huge speed hit. And if you look at the way OSX allocates App memory, it caches quite a bit of what an app needs (even after you quit it) in RAM, so after the first launch there's not much hit there.

But forget that, compare one of these RAM drives to the alternatives:

The base 2GB model will cost $700, + about $250 for the RAM to put in it. That's just shy of $1000 for 2GB of storage. Go up to 4GB, and you're going to spend at least $1400.

Compare that to the Fujitsu MAS3184 15,000RPM SCSI Ultra320 18GB drive. About $200 at NewEgg. Assume you will be able to buy an Adaptec Ultra320 hardware RAID PCI-X adapter in the $300 range.

Making those assumptions, for a little more than $1000 you can have a 72GB, 4-drive, RAID-0 15K RPM array. Being that the individual drives have latencies in the 6ms range, that's what you'd call fast. Definitely not as fast as a RAM disk, and it'd make one heckuva lot more noise, but I have a feeling that'd launch an app pretty darned fast, and you'd have 36 times more space to play with.

For the same price as the 4GB model, you could get yourself two MAS3735 73GB 15K drives instead. That's 140GB, with a hardware transfer rate of 150MB/s in a two drive array.

Sorry, if I had that kind of money to blow, I'd go with a beastly SCSI array or an XServe RAID. Since I don't I'll just be very happy with a $150 WD SATA Raptor in a G5.
 

daveg5

macrumors 6502a
Nov 28, 2001
741
0
For the same price as the 4GB model, you could get yourself two MAS3735 73GB 15K drives instead. That's 140GB, with a hardware transfer rate of 150MB/s in a two drive array.

Sorry, if I had that kind of money to blow, I'd go with a beastly SCSI array or an XServe RAID. Since I don't I'll just be very happy with a $150 WD SATA Raptor in a G5. [/B][/QUOTE]
i agree the raptor or if you have a scsi 320card already the same priced scsi 10000 rpm about $150 seagate 10k6, maxtor 4, fuji 10000.
however there is one big difference harddrives fluctuate wildly even in raid fromspin up to seek to reading and writing. but the memory ramdisk would always be at peak performance and remeber everything when cut off.
way too much though. maybe for some companies where time in seconds is money
 
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