faster loading -> flash RAID
 

Hi,

I'm not a patient guy, and the thing I hate most about my current rig is the loading times on games.

I'm booting and loading from a Raptor36, so thats pretty fast.

I was thinking about adding a RAID card and throwing in a few flash memory cards.

They are priced 30€/Gb opposed to 100/Gb for RAM, so thats cheaper.
I know hard disks go cheaper, but I want something real fast that doesnt take any space, adding 4 HD's in RAID0 will be faster than 4 flash memorys in RAID0, but I dont need the Gigabytes and I don't have the space in my game rig...

Is this a good idea?
Whats is the best flash type?
I know usb does 480Mb/sec which is faster than what a hard disk does, but do flash drives catch up to this speed?

I've read this but it doesn't help me..

You guys hava any ideas on which connection type (CF, SD, USB) is easely connected to RAID, which media is fast. And which raid cards are good for this idea?


My first thought was to manually order a bunch of flash memory, solder them on a printboard, ad a few managment components, write a driver and slam this into my pci slot, but that plan seemed harder then presumed.

Offcource I'll mount the media in read-only.

Flashdisk maximum read speed is much slower than HDD

20-30Mb/s Flash vs 40-60Mb/s HDD

How bout the (flash) memory being used as HD buffer?
That should be faster than HD capabilities?
How bout building a raid only with that?;)

I'd only need +-4Gb, but less expensive than the PCI-RAM cards and faster than HD..

virtual RAM drive of ~2Gb?

100€/Gb is to expensive...

Seems like it's a plan that won't come together, unless I can find flash with 60Mb/sec readspeed...

Just let me ask, how much RAM do you have on your system right now? You can greatly decrease loading times simply making sure you have 2gb in your rig...

not too likely
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mem...h-roundup.html

what about high speed SD-cards in RAID ? A 150x would be good for about 22Mbs so 4x512Mb should get you around 60Mbs and at <€50/Gb it wouldn't be that expensive. You'd only need a few USB2.0 card readers too.

If putting flash disks in raid is possible.

putting flash in raid... not seen it done yet
the raid will increase access times
and I don't think you'll be getting anywhere close 60mb/s pure file transfer due to the overhead

reality is, that you're best of with RAM in case you really want a superfast drive

stick 4Gb in your system, dedicate 2Gb to a virtual drive, set all your temp folders and pagefile to use that new drive, and enjoy the fastest loading times you've ever seen :)

The idea was to put them into RAID0.

I've got 1G ram for the moment.

I'll see whats cheapest: 4CF+RAID card or 1Gb ram. :)