Jaga wrote:I've used Softperfect in the past (for about the last 6 years), and being familiar with RAMdrives I can say that Primo RamDisk is a much better program, with far more features. I've used it in a production environment since switching now for ~5 months and haven't encountered any issues at all.
If you're going to need a large (1TB+) non-volatile RAMdisk, it's going to take *forever* to save at shutdown and load at startup, if you're using conventional spindle drives for the underlying image instead of SSDs. The reason is the size of the image you're saying you need. If you're going to be dealing with an image size over 64gig, I'd highly recommend a SSD or SSD Array holding the image, purely for speed.
There is of course no comparison between a RAMdisk and a SSD drive - the RAMdisk will outperform any of them except the NVME variety. But at that point, you're getting back into expensive hardware if you buy a large (1TB+) NVME SSD. A 1TB Samsung M.2 NVME is over $600, and offers no redundancy.
A very large PrimoCache caching solution on top of a good SSD is another option, as Support suggested. And it will cost a lot less, but it is much more hit-and-miss as to what PrimoCache is going to cache for you, and the overall speed won't compare to having a RAMdisk holding the content.
Appreciate the detailed explanation,
Long ramdisk Boot time was also one of my main concern as well.
But in my case i'm using custom ups to prevent the server from turning off during blackout.
It did happen once or twice though during long blackout.
Another strange issue with ramdisk was i had to reformat the ramdisk drive if the server reboots,
then i have to copy the entire content again after formatting.
There was also this one time image update wasnt saved into ramdisk,
I was using a cheap 2133 mhz ram from geil, not sure if that could be a factor,
In general i think the read write process into the ramdisk wasnt stable
Jaga wrote:
Perhaps you could expand a bit on what you *really* need, and we can help further. You've said you need space - is it just 1TB or 2+? Are you concerned with ccboot Server boot-up times? Do you need the volume(s) you're hosting to be non-volatile, or can they wipe with every shutdown or a crash? Are you truly concerned with having the fastest volumes possible (RAMdisk) vs just a SSD? How much money can you afford to throw at the solution? And, how will the 'gamedisk' be accessed - totally random across all the data, or just certain games at a time? Will you have multiple clients connecting to it to run different games simultaneously, or just a single client accessing a single game for a period of time (days to weeks)?
The best solution for you depends on your need, and budget.
I need around 4-6 Tb i suppose,
Budget probably under 1K,
I'm considering 4x firecuda @2TB each which is rated at 150-180 MBps
Then i will raid 5 to get 3x times read speed and 1x drive failure protection.
3 times of that should get me near the SATA 3 max transfer speed limit.
But someone on other forums said >100MBps is only good for sequential read, not random IO
I'm not sure yet how gamedisk is accessed,
I have 30 clients, and basically server-client is communicating on ISCSI protocol,
and client is given the same gamedisk drive as the one in server.
Any changes on the gamedisk server requires the client to reboot their PC in order to see the changes.
Server boot-up times is not a concern, the problem is for large AAA games client have to wait too long before it loads.
Other ccboot users solve this by replacing the gamedisk from hdd from ssd, that's why i thought primocache could help somehow.
Edit : this is the current r/w speed of my gamedisk
Kinda strange cause i raid 0 2 of this drive :
http://hdd.userbenchmark.com/WD-Black-1 ... ating/1822
Looks like crystaldiskmark only reads one of them?