Whats faster?

Dr Studly

Dr Studly

banned
This is just a little thing i was curious about... it is prolly the stupidest question in the world...


whats faster?
running something wtih PC133 SDRAM
or using virtual memory with a 15K RPM Harddrive SCSI using either a PCI 64bit (in a 64bit slot) or a PCI-e card?
 
RAM is ALWAYS faster then your hdd. RAM can send the files almost instantly to the cpu, where as it takes a little more, or alot more (depending on PATA or SATA) to send the files to the cpu. I dont technichally know WHY ram is better, but i know its better, even PC133. I wasnt even aware you could run a system without ram.
 
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i'd have to go with the memory. its more reliable, plus any hard drive interface (i.e. sata2) wouldn't perform as quickly as memory would.
not to mention, with hard drives there are a lot more things to take into account, such as latency (which is what the 15krpm would effect) and bandwidth (which buffer size and interface would effect).. plus there are all sorts of types.
overall though, hard drives can fit a LOT more memory, and memory modules can fit a LOT less, however performing at much faster speeds.
now, if you got 6 of those 15krpm hard drives and put them in raid 0, you might come close to the performance of pc133... but if one hard drive fails then you lose all the info... of course the methods of storage are different... hell it might even beat the memory in a benchmark or two... you'd have to try it.
ultimately, the ram modules are a LOT faster, but they can store less memory.
not to mention, the system specs would effect it a lot too. i mean, look at the latest AMD processors... with added support for DDR2 they easily overcome intels procs in memory bandwidth because of hypertransport technology.
 
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Guess it could also depend on the amount of ram you have. If you have 16mb, then a 15k SATA hdd would pry be faster lol. Im not for sure on that though.
 
{LSK} Otacon said:
Guess it could also depend on the amount of ram you have. If you have 16mb, then a 15k SATA hdd would pry be faster lol. Im not for sure on that though.
Click to expand...

i think he meant assuming you've got enough.
plus, what if the system with 16mb of memory has two 15krpm hard drives in raid 0 with a 2gb paging file :) that would make that system faster haha

yea, generally its like comparing apples and cell phones. you can't say its like comparing apples and oranges because in truth you could substitute one for the other... but still, hard disks are meant for mass storage, not for speed. memory modules im sure will eventually replace hard disks altogether, but for the time being the technology isn't readily available for such things...

there was talk awhile back about making hybrid hard drives to speed up windows vista start-up... with some memory to store the operating system on, and then the hard disk platters for mass storage... duno what happened to that...
plus i think gigabyte sells a pci card that is used as a ram-disk which you pluged ddr or ddr2 memory into and the computer just communicates with it like it were a hard disk with... say 2 or 4gb of memory on it... not worth it if you ask me, since pci only supports i think like 133MB/s or something like that... w/e
 
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even PC133? what about PC100? or PC66? (there is a such thing as PC66)
and i am talking about PCI-express SCSI cards... how fast is PCI-e?
 
RAM is deffinetly faster. 15K hard drives have access times of around 3ms, RAM is only a few nano seconds.
 
yep, look at it this way... if it uses a pci bus thats 33mhz which is still half that of pc66 memory. pc133 is much faster than the hard drive.
 
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