Ultra Fast Booting from RAM Disk?

[realmadmartian]

What is the state of the art these days in RAM disks for storing the OS and booting from? I really need to cut down my boot time and even 50% reduction won't be fast enough.

 

[Nitro350Z]

depends on how much cash you have.

if you want to go all out, then buy 8 of those ram drives, fill them up with memory, buy a good raid card that supports 8 devices or more, then put them all in raid 0, that should yeild some insane performance.

but otherwise, ram disks alone arent as fast as you think, and anyway, to speed up the boot you could also get a faster proc.

it all depends on your budget.

 

[realmadmartian]

Already got the Core 2 Duo. I have a Raptor drive but it still isn't nearly fast enough.

 

[darkstar782]

Solution = dont shut down?

What do you need such a fast boot for?

Tbh, the only way is Gigabytes I-Ram, but one of them wont help as its limited to SATA1 speed (150MiB/s or so).

Therefore, you will need a RAID0 array of these things... maybe 3 of them. They take up one PCI slot each so you wont have much more room

Then of course you need the DIMMs, you are talking 12GB of DDR1 in 1gb DIMMs, still small for a C: drive but hey, its 450MiB/s sustained, except for the fact that unless the controller is part of the southbridge it is either PCI (133MiB/s shared with other PCI devices) or PCI-E (x1, most likely for an onboard controller, limited to 250MiB/s).

You'll therefore need a motherboard that supports dual Gfx cards, and a RAID controller like This that supports PCI-Ex8. Of course you can never run SLi or Crossfire now.

Add to that, you'll then find the processing tasks on boot are your new bottleneck.

Cost:

Promise SuperTrak 16350 controller: £533
3*Gigabyte I-Ram: £330
12*1GB DDR1 Dimms: £740


Total: £1603, or about $3000, for 12GB of storage. Thats £133 per GB, compared to £1 per GB for a Raptor.

Are you sure you care that much?

 

[realmadmartian]

Sounds like I gotta wait a couple more years before I achieve 10-second boots.