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External RAM?
I was wondering if I could add RAM without messing with the MB. Google
tells me that evidently you can use an external HD or thumb drive as RAM. Is this effective? Anyone tried it? Anything better and easy to add? TIA -- I love a good meal! That's why I don't cook. |
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#2
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External RAM?
Ken,
Google tells me that evidently you can use an external HD or thumb drive as RAM. Both are possible. But both an HD and USB are slow in regard to internal, real RAM, and USB memory will wear out rather quickly (it only handles so many writes). Actually, your 'puter already uses the HD for RAM, using a method called "page swapping". If you are unlucky you can hear the HD trash around while the running program (movie, game, etc) stutters a bit. In short, do try and see if you can access the MB and put some RAM in a still-open slot. It will work so much better. Regards, Rudy Wieser |
#3
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External RAM?
KenK wrote:
I was wondering if I could add RAM without messing with the MB. Google tells me that evidently you can use an external HD or thumb drive as RAM. Is this effective? Anyone tried it? Anything better and easy to add? TIA So you know there is RAM (dynamic DRAM or DRAM) inside the computer. It's fast, and it happens to be volatile. Some day, it's not going to be volatile any more and will remember things even with the power off. https://images10.newegg.com/ProductI...42-327-Z01.jpg You might notice, if you look at a bunch of motherboard pictures, the RAM is always reasonably close to the processor itself. At one time, the RAM connected to the Northbridge chip, and then from the Northbridge to the CPU. But that wasn't fast enough. So then they started connecting the RAM (RAM busses) right on the CPU itself. Eliminate the middle man. Only inches away from the CPU. One reason for getting closer, is time-of-flight. Things cannot go faster than the speed of light in the medium. So we like to snug the RAM up, as close to the CPU as possible. ******* OK, great, that doesn't guarantee what works, but it's an observation none-the-less. Closer is better. At one time, we were tight for RAM, and they had "Extended" and "Expanded" memory. This was placed on a card, and put in one of the expansion slots (like a PCI slot, or hopefully, something much faster). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory Now, imagine something this horrible. OK, we got memory chips alright, and people at the time would love to own one of these. (They would drool over stuff like this.) But the bus connection is ISA bus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:E...st_4M_ISA.jpeg And one of the ISA bus entries here is rated at 8.33MB/sec. Well, I have one processor here that snorts info at 17000MB/sec. That card would be a joke in practical terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates The PCI Express bus comes close. A byte lane on PCI Express Rev3 is 985MB/sec, and we round to 1GB/sec. A x16 slot gives 16GB/sec. Now, we're getting close to being in the ballpark. The buffer inside the CPU, for the PCI Express bus, it uses small buffers for PCI Express packets, and this limits the practical rate, such that you don't get 16GB/sec. It might be as bad as 8GB/sec in practical situations. It all depends on how "generous" Intel is with their buffers for the packets. But today, we don't really have extended and expanded as part of the terminology. ******* Now, here's one from the year 2009. But it's got a couple things wrong with it. It benches at 215MB/sec on reads. Still too slow. It appears to Device Manager as a disk drive. Now, we need software, page-file-like software, if we wanted to expand the RAM. https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storag...Specifications ******* If we move forward, Intel has a scheme with the word "Optane" in it, which works as RAM. https://www.anandtech.com/show/11208...-xpoint-memory Typical Latency (R/W) 10µs Now, that's slow, but they still use it for paging anyway. Paging that isn't quite as visible to the OS. "Intel Memory Drive Technology Along with the DC P4800X, Intel is launching Intel Memory Drive Technology software as a paid add-on. The Memory Drive Technology software is a custom virtual memory system implemented as a minimal hypervisor. The guest operating system or general-purpose hypervisor is presented with the illusion that a portion of the 3D XPoint memory on the Optane SSD is directly addressable, producing an apparent memory capacity that far exceeds the capacity of the system's installed DRAM. Under the hood and almost entirely transparent to the guest OS, Intel Memory Drive Technology monitors memory access patterns to cache actively used data in DRAM and prefetch from Optane SSDs. At a high level, this is merely duplicating the paging mechanisms all operating systems already provide. However, Intel claims that the heuristics used by Memory Drive Technology can far outperform those currently used by operating systems to manage swap space residing on storage that is far slower than Optane SSDs. On some workloads Intel Memory Drive Technology can offer performance approaching that of an all-DRAM memory pool of equal capacity, though this will depend highly on the specific application workload. Intel Memory Drive Technology has a substantial capacity overhead: a 375GB Optane SSD can provide up to 320GB of virtual memory. Multiple Optane SSDs can be used to provide virtual memory up to ten times the system's DRAM capacity, though Intel recommends Optane to DRAM ratios between 3:1 and 8:1. When multiple CPUs or Optane SSDs are in use, the Memory Drive Technology software will take into account non-uniform memory access (NUMA) effects and attempt to optimize data placement to put data in the DRAM or Optane SSD that is closest to the core using it. By default, the Memory Drive Technology software will present to the guest OS a NUMA topology equivalent to the underlying DRAM configuration plus a pool of memory that is not local to any of the processors, with capacity equal to the virtual memory provided by the Optane SSDs. However, this is implemented purely for the sake of allowing NUMA-aware software to adapt its usage patterns; regardless of the NUMA configuration seen by the guest software, the Memory Drive Technology software will not be statically allocating specific address ranges to DRAM or Optane storage. The approach taken by the Memory Drive Technology software allows operating systems and applications to function without modification and without requiring Optane-specific optimizations, but it also means there is no way for applications that are NUMA-aware or use system calls like madvise to communicate directly with the real memory allocator. The full licensing cost structure for Intel Memory Drive Technology is not clear, but the MSRP for a 375GB P4800X bundled with Memory Drive Technology is $1951 compared to $1520 for the SSD alone. The Memory Drive Technology hypervisor must be booted from a USB device or an IDE-compatible storage controller, and the guest operating system cannot be booted in UEFI mode. Intel Xeon E5-x6xx v2 or later and E7-x8xx v2 or later processors are supported. [I.e. Not desktop processors] " So if you started with a Xeon motherboard with 64GB of real RAM, you could install two 375GB Optane cards for $4000 and have a 64+640GB total RAM motherboard. Speed would be on the order of 4GB/sec, and still a bit shy of the 16GB per second I was looking for. If the Intel Optane card was replaced with a card with DRAM on it, like 128GB LRDIMMs or something, you could build a comparable memory capacity, and use the Intel software to page in and out of it. And it would smoke pretty good :-) ******* If you walk into the Walmart today, could you buy something like that ? $20 won't buy you a lot of hardware, and no matter what subsystem your $20 was tied into, it would be pretty slow in any case. I believe there probably are whizzy setups in HPC labs around the world, that we don't hear about. For example, you can join PCI Express busses together like Lego and build bigger things. The PCI Express bus *can* be extended outside the PC box, and the Bitcoin miners show an example. These allow gadgets like video cards, to run outside the PC. We don't get to see too many pictures of lashups with these, but at least it shows one of the form-factors out there. http://cryptomining-blog.com/tag/pci-express-extender/ ******* If you're not mobile, it's possible an organization like Geek Squad makes house calls. Maybe you could get them to add RAM on-site. Many older motherboards, simply don't have the space for extensive quantities of additional RAM. Maybe the old RAM has to be removed, to make room for a larger set. Or if you want larger expansion options, it's a new motherboard. I have an S370 motherboard with 1.5GB of RAM. I have an Asrock 4Core board which only held a max of 2GB of DDR2 RAM. And that one, I had a Core2 processor in it (2.6GHz). That makes a fine WinXP board. My typing machine is an X48 based motherboard, and holds 8GB of DDR2. 3.1GB of that is available in WinXP x32, and 4GB is used as a RAM Drive. The excess RAM is not wasted, but works like a disk drive. https://s17.postimg.org/o3q61a3u7/RAMdrives.gif That's what happens when you have too much RAM. WinXP x32 doesn't really go over 3.1GB for your copy of Firefox. And when you buy items like this, you'll never have to complain about running out of RAM slots. This one has room for 32 DIMMs. At $200 for a relatively cheap DIMM, it takes $6400 just to fill the slots with something and make it look pretty :-) The CPUs range from $750 to $2100 or so for the various versions. To run WinXP on this, requires using the cheaper CPUs, because the $2100 ones have too many cores for WinXP Pro :-) https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/mot.../H11DSU-iN.cfm And at 17" x 17", it won't fit in your computer case, and will be easy to reach for RAM upgrades :-) I'm sure Stephen Hawking wants one of those (he was given a computer with a 1TB or 2TB limit a number of years ago, and theoretically that board could top it). ******* If you want to get some idea of what options you have, take a look at the machine using CPUZ. You won't have to open it up, but you'll get some identifiers about what is inside the box. https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html Zip English 32 or 64-bit version This is the info that is useful for someone picking out an upgrade for you. If I sent this to Geek Squad, I would expect the staff to decode this and give me a price and options. Or, if you provide the info here, I can take a crack at it. https://s17.postimg.org/8c07b8u6n/I_...Geek_Squad.gif It takes time to test RAM after it is installed, but the time to plug in the DIMMs shouldn't take more than ten minutes with an anti-static strap. For devices like tablets with the RAM soldered down, you can't upgrade those. The above info is mainly for the "easy" cases like desktop computers. Even some laptops have "half" the RAM soldered down. CPUZ cannot tell you where they have dribbled solder and made upgrades impossible. Paul |
#4
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External RAM?
On 12/30/2017 10:57 AM, KenK wrote:
I was wondering if I could add RAM without messing with the MB. Google tells me that evidently you can use an external HD or thumb drive as RAM. Is this effective? Anyone tried it? Anything better and easy to add? TIA It will be too slow to do you much good. Not a big deal to install RAM in your computer. That said, if you are running the 32 bit version of XP , it won't do you any good to install more than 3 gigs unless you enable PAE, and that can be tricky |
#5
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External RAM?
Paul wrote:
KenK wrote: I was wondering if I could add RAM without messing with the MB. Google tells me that evidently you can use an external HD or thumb drive as RAM. Is this effective? Anyone tried it? Anything better and easy to add? TIA So you know there is RAM (dynamic DRAM or DRAM) inside the computer. It's fast, and it happens to be volatile. Some day, it's not going to be volatile any more and will remember things even with the power off. https://images10.newegg.com/ProductI...20-242-327-Z01 .jpg You might notice, if you look at a bunch of motherboard pictures, the RAM is always reasonably close to the processor itself. At one time, the RAM connected to the Northbridge chip, and then from the Northbridge to the CPU. But that wasn't fast enough. So then they started connecting the RAM (RAM busses) right on the CPU itself. Eliminate the middle man. Only inches away from the CPU. One reason for getting closer, is time-of-flight. Things cannot go faster than the speed of light in the medium. So we like to snug the RAM up, as close to the CPU as possible. ******* OK, great, that doesn't guarantee what works, but it's an observation none-the-less. Closer is better. At one time, we were tight for RAM, and they had "Extended" and "Expanded" memory. This was placed on a card, and put in one of the expansion slots (like a PCI slot, or hopefully, something much faster). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory Now, imagine something this horrible. OK, we got memory chips alright, and people at the time would love to own one of these. (They would drool over stuff like this.) But the bus connection is ISA bus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:E...st_4M_ISA.jpeg And one of the ISA bus entries here is rated at 8.33MB/sec. Well, I have one processor here that snorts info at 17000MB/sec. That card would be a joke in practical terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates The PCI Express bus comes close. A byte lane on PCI Express Rev3 is 985MB/sec, and we round to 1GB/sec. A x16 slot gives 16GB/sec. Now, we're getting close to being in the ballpark. The buffer inside the CPU, for the PCI Express bus, it uses small buffers for PCI Express packets, and this limits the practical rate, such that you don't get 16GB/sec. It might be as bad as 8GB/sec in practical situations. It all depends on how "generous" Intel is with their buffers for the packets. But today, we don't really have extended and expanded as part of the terminology. ******* Now, here's one from the year 2009. But it's got a couple things wrong with it. It benches at 215MB/sec on reads. Still too slow. It appears to Device Manager as a disk drive. Now, we need software, page-file-like software, if we wanted to expand the RAM. https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storag...nd-running-PCI -E-RAM-based-SSD/Packaging-Specifications ******* If we move forward, Intel has a scheme with the word "Optane" in it, which works as RAM. https://www.anandtech.com/show/11208...tane-ssd-dc-p4 800x-with-3d-xpoint-memory Typical Latency (R/W) 10µs Now, that's slow, but they still use it for paging anyway. Paging that isn't quite as visible to the OS. "Intel Memory Drive Technology Along with the DC P4800X, Intel is launching Intel Memory Drive Technology software as a paid add-on. The Memory Drive Technology software is a custom virtual memory system implemented as a minimal hypervisor. The guest operating system or general-purpose hypervisor is presented with the illusion that a portion of the 3D XPoint memory on the Optane SSD is directly addressable, producing an apparent memory capacity that far exceeds the capacity of the system's installed DRAM. Under the hood and almost entirely transparent to the guest OS, Intel Memory Drive Technology monitors memory access patterns to cache actively used data in DRAM and prefetch from Optane SSDs. At a high level, this is merely duplicating the paging mechanisms all operating systems already provide. However, Intel claims that the heuristics used by Memory Drive Technology can far outperform those currently used by operating systems to manage swap space residing on storage that is far slower than Optane SSDs. On some workloads Intel Memory Drive Technology can offer performance approaching that of an all-DRAM memory pool of equal capacity, though this will depend highly on the specific application workload. Intel Memory Drive Technology has a substantial capacity overhead: a 375GB Optane SSD can provide up to 320GB of virtual memory. Multiple Optane SSDs can be used to provide virtual memory up to ten times the system's DRAM capacity, though Intel recommends Optane to DRAM ratios between 3:1 and 8:1. When multiple CPUs or Optane SSDs are in use, the Memory Drive Technology software will take into account non-uniform memory access (NUMA) effects and attempt to optimize data placement to put data in the DRAM or Optane SSD that is closest to the core using it. By default, the Memory Drive Technology software will present to the guest OS a NUMA topology equivalent to the underlying DRAM configuration plus a pool of memory that is not local to any of the processors, with capacity equal to the virtual memory provided by the Optane SSDs. However, this is implemented purely for the sake of allowing NUMA-aware software to adapt its usage patterns; regardless of the NUMA configuration seen by the guest software, the Memory Drive Technology software will not be statically allocating specific address ranges to DRAM or Optane storage. The approach taken by the Memory Drive Technology software allows operating systems and applications to function without modification and without requiring Optane-specific optimizations, but it also means there is no way for applications that are NUMA-aware or use system calls like madvise to communicate directly with the real memory allocator. The full licensing cost structure for Intel Memory Drive Technology is not clear, but the MSRP for a 375GB P4800X bundled with Memory Drive Technology is $1951 compared to $1520 for the SSD alone. The Memory Drive Technology hypervisor must be booted from a USB device or an IDE-compatible storage controller, and the guest operating system cannot be booted in UEFI mode. Intel Xeon E5-x6xx v2 or later and E7-x8xx v2 or later processors are supported. [I.e. Not desktop processors] " So if you started with a Xeon motherboard with 64GB of real RAM, you could install two 375GB Optane cards for $4000 and have a 64+640GB total RAM motherboard. Speed would be on the order of 4GB/sec, and still a bit shy of the 16GB per second I was looking for. If the Intel Optane card was replaced with a card with DRAM on it, like 128GB LRDIMMs or something, you could build a comparable memory capacity, and use the Intel software to page in and out of it. And it would smoke pretty good :-) ******* If you walk into the Walmart today, could you buy something like that ? $20 won't buy you a lot of hardware, and no matter what subsystem your $20 was tied into, it would be pretty slow in any case. I believe there probably are whizzy setups in HPC labs around the world, that we don't hear about. For example, you can join PCI Express busses together like Lego and build bigger things. The PCI Express bus can be extended outside the PC box, and the Bitcoin miners show an example. These allow gadgets like video cards, to run outside the PC. We don't get to see too many pictures of lashups with these, but at least it shows one of the form-factors out there. http://cryptomining-blog.com/tag/pci-express-extender/ ******* If you're not mobile, it's possible an organization like Geek Squad makes house calls. Maybe you could get them to add RAM on-site. Many older motherboards, simply don't have the space for extensive quantities of additional RAM. Maybe the old RAM has to be removed, to make room for a larger set. Or if you want larger expansion options, it's a new motherboard. I have an S370 motherboard with 1.5GB of RAM. I have an Asrock 4Core board which only held a max of 2GB of DDR2 RAM. And that one, I had a Core2 processor in it (2.6GHz). That makes a fine WinXP board. My typing machine is an X48 based motherboard, and holds 8GB of DDR2. 3.1GB of that is available in WinXP x32, and 4GB is used as a RAM Drive. The excess RAM is not wasted, but works like a disk drive. https://s17.postimg.org/o3q61a3u7/RAMdrives.gif That's what happens when you have too much RAM. WinXP x32 doesn't really go over 3.1GB for your copy of Firefox. And when you buy items like this, you'll never have to complain about running out of RAM slots. This one has room for 32 DIMMs. At $200 for a relatively cheap DIMM, it takes $6400 just to fill the slots with something and make it look pretty :-) The CPUs range from $750 to $2100 or so for the various versions. To run WinXP on this, requires using the cheaper CPUs, because the $2100 ones have too many cores for WinXP Pro :-) https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/mot.../H11DSU-iN.cfm And at 17" x 17", it won't fit in your computer case, and will be easy to reach for RAM upgrades :-) I'm sure Stephen Hawking wants one of those (he was given a computer with a 1TB or 2TB limit a number of years ago, and theoretically that board could top it). ******* If you want to get some idea of what options you have, take a look at the machine using CPUZ. You won't have to open it up, but you'll get some identifiers about what is inside the box. https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html Zip English 32 or 64-bit version This is the info that is useful for someone picking out an upgrade for you. If I sent this to Geek Squad, I would expect the staff to decode this and give me a price and options. Or, if you provide the info here, I can take a crack at it. https://s17.postimg.org/8c07b8u6n/I_...send_email_to_ Geek_Squad.gif It takes time to test RAM after it is installed, but the time to plug in the DIMMs shouldn't take more than ten minutes with an anti-static strap. For devices like tablets with the RAM soldered down, you can't upgrade those. The above info is mainly for the "easy" cases like desktop computers. Even some laptops have "half" the RAM soldered down. CPUZ cannot tell you where they have dribbled solder and made upgrades impossible. Paul Paul, you reminded me of the old AST "Six Pack" It was one of those LIM (Lotus Intel Microsoft) EMS boards. http://www.retrocomputing.net/parts/...0080sixpak.JPG You had to manually insert 9 chips in each bank, 9th chip was for parity. I remember begging my manager for a few extra chips as it was VERY easy to bend pins on those "DIP" chips!!! Wow! How time flies! Do you remember the old debug command" G=C800:5 (for WD)?? I'm getting old! JT -- |
#6
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External RAM?
On 12/30/2017 07:55 PM, JT wrote:
Paul wrote: KenK wrote: I was wondering if I could add RAM without messing with the MB. Google tells me that evidently you can use an external HD or thumb drive as RAM. Is this effective? Anyone tried it? Anything better and easy to add? TIA So you know there is RAM (dynamic DRAM or DRAM) inside the computer. It's fast, and it happens to be volatile. Some day, it's not going to be volatile any more and will remember things even with the power off. https://images10.newegg.com/ProductI...20-242-327-Z01 .jpg You might notice, if you look at a bunch of motherboard pictures, the RAM is always reasonably close to the processor itself. At one time, the RAM connected to the Northbridge chip, and then from the Northbridge to the CPU. But that wasn't fast enough. So then they started connecting the RAM (RAM busses) right on the CPU itself. Eliminate the middle man. Only inches away from the CPU. One reason for getting closer, is time-of-flight. Things cannot go faster than the speed of light in the medium. So we like to snug the RAM up, as close to the CPU as possible. ******* OK, great, that doesn't guarantee what works, but it's an observation none-the-less. Closer is better. At one time, we were tight for RAM, and they had "Extended" and "Expanded" memory. This was placed on a card, and put in one of the expansion slots (like a PCI slot, or hopefully, something much faster). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_memory Now, imagine something this horrible. OK, we got memory chips alright, and people at the time would love to own one of these. (They would drool over stuff like this.) But the bus connection is ISA bus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:E...st_4M_ISA.jpeg And one of the ISA bus entries here is rated at 8.33MB/sec. Well, I have one processor here that snorts info at 17000MB/sec. That card would be a joke in practical terms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates The PCI Express bus comes close. A byte lane on PCI Express Rev3 is 985MB/sec, and we round to 1GB/sec. A x16 slot gives 16GB/sec. Now, we're getting close to being in the ballpark. The buffer inside the CPU, for the PCI Express bus, it uses small buffers for PCI Express packets, and this limits the practical rate, such that you don't get 16GB/sec. It might be as bad as 8GB/sec in practical situations. It all depends on how "generous" Intel is with their buffers for the packets. But today, we don't really have extended and expanded as part of the terminology. ******* Now, here's one from the year 2009. But it's got a couple things wrong with it. It benches at 215MB/sec on reads. Still too slow. It appears to Device Manager as a disk drive. Now, we need software, page-file-like software, if we wanted to expand the RAM. https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Storag...nd-running-PCI -E-RAM-based-SSD/Packaging-Specifications ******* If we move forward, Intel has a scheme with the word "Optane" in it, which works as RAM. https://www.anandtech.com/show/11208...tane-ssd-dc-p4 800x-with-3d-xpoint-memory Typical Latency (R/W) 10µs Now, that's slow, but they still use it for paging anyway. Paging that isn't quite as visible to the OS. "Intel Memory Drive Technology Along with the DC P4800X, Intel is launching Intel Memory Drive Technology software as a paid add-on. The Memory Drive Technology software is a custom virtual memory system implemented as a minimal hypervisor. The guest operating system or general-purpose hypervisor is presented with the illusion that a portion of the 3D XPoint memory on the Optane SSD is directly addressable, producing an apparent memory capacity that far exceeds the capacity of the system's installed DRAM. Under the hood and almost entirely transparent to the guest OS, Intel Memory Drive Technology monitors memory access patterns to cache actively used data in DRAM and prefetch from Optane SSDs. At a high level, this is merely duplicating the paging mechanisms all operating systems already provide. However, Intel claims that the heuristics used by Memory Drive Technology can far outperform those currently used by operating systems to manage swap space residing on storage that is far slower than Optane SSDs. On some workloads Intel Memory Drive Technology can offer performance approaching that of an all-DRAM memory pool of equal capacity, though this will depend highly on the specific application workload. Intel Memory Drive Technology has a substantial capacity overhead: a 375GB Optane SSD can provide up to 320GB of virtual memory. Multiple Optane SSDs can be used to provide virtual memory up to ten times the system's DRAM capacity, though Intel recommends Optane to DRAM ratios between 3:1 and 8:1. When multiple CPUs or Optane SSDs are in use, the Memory Drive Technology software will take into account non-uniform memory access (NUMA) effects and attempt to optimize data placement to put data in the DRAM or Optane SSD that is closest to the core using it. By default, the Memory Drive Technology software will present to the guest OS a NUMA topology equivalent to the underlying DRAM configuration plus a pool of memory that is not local to any of the processors, with capacity equal to the virtual memory provided by the Optane SSDs. However, this is implemented purely for the sake of allowing NUMA-aware software to adapt its usage patterns; regardless of the NUMA configuration seen by the guest software, the Memory Drive Technology software will not be statically allocating specific address ranges to DRAM or Optane storage. The approach taken by the Memory Drive Technology software allows operating systems and applications to function without modification and without requiring Optane-specific optimizations, but it also means there is no way for applications that are NUMA-aware or use system calls like madvise to communicate directly with the real memory allocator. The full licensing cost structure for Intel Memory Drive Technology is not clear, but the MSRP for a 375GB P4800X bundled with Memory Drive Technology is $1951 compared to $1520 for the SSD alone. The Memory Drive Technology hypervisor must be booted from a USB device or an IDE-compatible storage controller, and the guest operating system cannot be booted in UEFI mode. Intel Xeon E5-x6xx v2 or later and E7-x8xx v2 or later processors are supported. [I.e. Not desktop processors] " So if you started with a Xeon motherboard with 64GB of real RAM, you could install two 375GB Optane cards for $4000 and have a 64+640GB total RAM motherboard. Speed would be on the order of 4GB/sec, and still a bit shy of the 16GB per second I was looking for. If the Intel Optane card was replaced with a card with DRAM on it, like 128GB LRDIMMs or something, you could build a comparable memory capacity, and use the Intel software to page in and out of it. And it would smoke pretty good :-) ******* If you walk into the Walmart today, could you buy something like that ? $20 won't buy you a lot of hardware, and no matter what subsystem your $20 was tied into, it would be pretty slow in any case. I believe there probably are whizzy setups in HPC labs around the world, that we don't hear about. For example, you can join PCI Express busses together like Lego and build bigger things. The PCI Express bus can be extended outside the PC box, and the Bitcoin miners show an example. These allow gadgets like video cards, to run outside the PC. We don't get to see too many pictures of lashups with these, but at least it shows one of the form-factors out there. http://cryptomining-blog.com/tag/pci-express-extender/ ******* If you're not mobile, it's possible an organization like Geek Squad makes house calls. Maybe you could get them to add RAM on-site. Many older motherboards, simply don't have the space for extensive quantities of additional RAM. Maybe the old RAM has to be removed, to make room for a larger set. Or if you want larger expansion options, it's a new motherboard. I have an S370 motherboard with 1.5GB of RAM. I have an Asrock 4Core board which only held a max of 2GB of DDR2 RAM. And that one, I had a Core2 processor in it (2.6GHz). That makes a fine WinXP board. My typing machine is an X48 based motherboard, and holds 8GB of DDR2. 3.1GB of that is available in WinXP x32, and 4GB is used as a RAM Drive. The excess RAM is not wasted, but works like a disk drive. https://s17.postimg.org/o3q61a3u7/RAMdrives.gif That's what happens when you have too much RAM. WinXP x32 doesn't really go over 3.1GB for your copy of Firefox. And when you buy items like this, you'll never have to complain about running out of RAM slots. This one has room for 32 DIMMs. At $200 for a relatively cheap DIMM, it takes $6400 just to fill the slots with something and make it look pretty :-) The CPUs range from $750 to $2100 or so for the various versions. To run WinXP on this, requires using the cheaper CPUs, because the $2100 ones have too many cores for WinXP Pro :-) https://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/mot.../H11DSU-iN.cfm And at 17" x 17", it won't fit in your computer case, and will be easy to reach for RAM upgrades :-) I'm sure Stephen Hawking wants one of those (he was given a computer with a 1TB or 2TB limit a number of years ago, and theoretically that board could top it). ******* If you want to get some idea of what options you have, take a look at the machine using CPUZ. You won't have to open it up, but you'll get some identifiers about what is inside the box. https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html Zip English 32 or 64-bit version This is the info that is useful for someone picking out an upgrade for you. If I sent this to Geek Squad, I would expect the staff to decode this and give me a price and options. Or, if you provide the info here, I can take a crack at it. https://s17.postimg.org/8c07b8u6n/I_...send_email_to_ Geek_Squad.gif It takes time to test RAM after it is installed, but the time to plug in the DIMMs shouldn't take more than ten minutes with an anti-static strap. For devices like tablets with the RAM soldered down, you can't upgrade those. The above info is mainly for the "easy" cases like desktop computers. Even some laptops have "half" the RAM soldered down. CPUZ cannot tell you where they have dribbled solder and made upgrades impossible. Paul Paul, you reminded me of the old AST "Six Pack" It was one of those LIM (Lotus Intel Microsoft) EMS boards. http://www.retrocomputing.net/parts/...0080sixpak.JPG You had to manually insert 9 chips in each bank, 9th chip was for parity. I remember begging my manager for a few extra chips as it was VERY easy to bend pins on those "DIP" chips!!! Wow! How time flies! Do you remember the old debug command" G=C800:5 (for WD)?? I'm getting old! JT LOL: I do recall the debug command BTW: Speaking of adding RAM, I still have my Zenith Data Systems 286 It came with 512k of on-board RAM At some point I was given an ISA memory expansion board and just as an exercise installed 16 megs or RAM...the maximum a 286 can address. Had 16 megs of RAM been available at the time the 286 was manufactured, it would have cost a fortune. |
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External RAM?
In message , KenK
writes: I was wondering if I could add RAM without messing with the MB. Google tells me that evidently you can use an external HD or thumb drive as RAM. Is this effective? Anyone tried it? Anything better and easy to add? TIA As R. has said, your computer will already be using the _internal_ HD as RAM, _if_ you ever use more RAM than you have (task manager will tell you); this will already slow things down a _lot_. Any _external_ HD will be even slower because of the interface, unless you have external SATA, in which case it won't be any _faster_ than the internal drive. Thumb drives as external RAM are not a good idea - their life is short (I've even read horror-stories of it being in hours). And the interface slows them somewhat too. Paul's excellent as always article explores the subject completely, but all the solutions involve plugging things into the MB. _If_ you are exceeding the memory you have fitted, and that's less than about 3.5 GiB (for XP32), then fitting more - assuming your MB can _take_ more than it's already got (you may or may not have to remove some of what's there) is about the simplest upgrade there is: it's not really "messing with" the MB. And many computer stores will even do it for you, usually for a charge (smaller ones might not charge; don't insult by asking for something back for any RAM they have to remove, though - those are only worth pennies if that). If you have 256 or 512M, definitely add more; if you have 1G and use the web (especially with Firefox if more than a very few tabs), add more. If you have 2G, check with Task Manager whether you're getting close to using it all, and if you are, add more (probably involving replacing) if your mobo can take it (many netbooks can't take over a 2G module, and possibly some laptops from the XP era ditto - _possibly_ even some desktop mobos, though I haven't seen one with a 2G limit, limits are usually smaller or larger). It's really trivial to do (the only real difficulty is making sure you get compatible RAM, and your store - or, probably, those here - will help you with that), and - _if_ you're using all of what you've got anyway, as shown by Task Manager - will make a huge difference to the usability of the machine. (To check usage: right-click on empty part of taskbar and choose Task Manager; select Performance tab; look at "PF Usage".) -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf Everything will be all right in the end. And if everything isn't all right, then it isn't the end. - The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) |
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