Rocket Drive

How to Speed Up Your Computer's Worst Bottleneck: The Hard Drive

Introduction

Although many people are amazed, by how rapidly computer hardware performance evolves, there are still those of us who aren't satisfied. We recognize what is possible, and then we search to see if anyone is doing it. When we see that someone is indeed doing it, it frustrates us that the enhancement has not yet trickled down to the mainstream computers that can be purchased in the stores. It is this frustration that motivates me to inform you about Cenatek's Rocket Drive.

Stuff You May Already Know

Bottleneck Concept

If you had both, a 12oz glass of water and a 12oz bottle of water, and then turn them upside-down, which one would pour out quicker? Of course, the glass would. The bottle is wide at its base, yet it tapers in the neck leaving an opening that is narrower than the base of the bottle. Since the opening of the bottle is much smaller than the opening on the glass, less water is able to pour out simultaneously. The tapered opening (on the bottle) slows down the entire process of empting the bottle of its contents.

Well, this concept has become an analogy for describing the most impeding portion of any overall process. If you are driving in heavy traffic, and the 4 lane highway (your driving on) merges into a two lane highway. The two lane portion of the highway is said to be the highway's bottleneck. Notice that the 4 lane portion of the highway (in this example) is rather useless when it comes to the overall process of getting you to work as quickly as possible. Because of the bottleneck, your speed on the 4 lane portion of the highway (in very heavy traffic) will not be faster than your speed on the two lane portion of the highway; you simply can't go faster than the cars that are heavily packed in front of you.

In this article, I'll be discussing how a computer's hard drive is a bottleneck for memory access, but first let see just how frequently a computer needs to access memory.

Computers Frequently Access Memory

Computers must have a place for storing and retrieving data. If you wrote a computer program like this:

line 1:    x = 1
line 2:    y = 2
line 3:    z = x+y
line 4:    Show Value of z.

Computer Output: 3

Without memory, a computer couldn't execute line three of the program above. It must have a place to store the values of x and y during the program. If it doesn't, it won't "remember" their corresponding values during the execution of line three.

Consider how many times memory is accessed in this short program: In Lines one and two the computer stores the values of x and y in memory. And, in line three, the computer has to retrieve those values (from memory) and add them together, and then it has to again store the result (z =3) in memory. In line 4, memory has to be accessed again to retrieve the value of z.

If a simple program like the one above requires this much memory access, can you imagine how much memory access is required for you to use a word processor, record a song, or edit a video? Also, can you see how important it must be for the computer to be able to access memory quickly? I mean, if (in the program above) it took ten seconds for each time the computer stored or retrieved a value you probably wouldn't consider the result to be worth the wait.

Hard Drive Memory versus Random Access Memory (RAM)

Now that you are aware of how frequently a computer must access memory. I'll now discuss the differences between hard drive memory and RAM (Random Access memory).

Your computer can store and read information Way Faster in RAM than it can in a hard drive. RAM is so much faster than a hard drive that I've had a very difficult time determining exactly how much faster it is! Your see, the hard drive is a memory access bottleneck. Since it is slower than all the other parts (it is connected to) it is easier to see how slow it is. However, RAM is faster than all the parts it's connected to. Because of this, RAM seems to be able to received data as fast as you can send it, and it seems that you can retrieve data from RAM, just as fast as you can pull it.

Surely RAM has speed limitations, but as far as I've been able to tell, the parts (in a computer) that the RAM connects to seem to be what limits RAM's speed.

Hard drives are mechanical devices. They contain disc shaped platters that spin at thousands of revolutions per minute. As the platters are spinning, a small magnetic sensor (called a read head) is mounted in there in such a way that it can slide back and forth while hovering closely above the surface of the spinning platters.

It amazes me how a hard drive can read and write magnetically to such an incredibly precise location on a meal platter spinning at 7200 RPM. That translates into a mind boggling 120 revolutions in one second! How would you like to try to write your name on something spinning that fast?

Despite these amazing mechanics, my IDE 7200 rpm hard drive can only sustain a data transfer rate of about five to ten megabytes per second. This is an incredible bottle neck when you consider that the IDE controller that the hard drive plugs into (inside most computers) is capable of transferring data of 10 times that amount  per second. The IDE controller is constantly waiting on the hard drive, and guess what, any time a part in your computer is waiting SO ARE YOU!

I don't know the sustained data transfer rate of RAM, but I do know that it far exceeds that of which the IDE controller is capable of handling. RAM doesn't plug into an IDE controller; it plugs into slots that are directly on the motherboard.

Unlike a hard drive, RAM is not a mechanical device. It doesn't have any moving mechanical parts. You can't hear RAM while it is reading and storing data like you can with a hard drive. With RAM, data is stored electronically (exclusively).

Although, a hard drive uses electricity to power its mechanics (spinning the platters and moving the read heads) RAM's exclusive use of electricity is apparently a much faster method of storing and reading data.

Now, as you can see, my goal in this section of the article was to inform that RAM is way faster than a hard drive for accessing and transferring data (to and from memory), but I also want to address a question that I suspect you have at this point:

If RAM is so much faster than a hard drive, why don't they just do away with hard drives, and only use RAM?

1. RAM is volatile, it must keep a constant electric current to maintain data. When you turn your computer off, any data stored in RAM vanishes.
2. RAM manufactures have convinced the market that RAM is more expensive to produce (byte for byte) than hard drive memory. At the time of this writing, most store bought computers have 512 MB or less of RAM (memory) while they come with an 80GB hard drive. In other words, computers these days are being sold with 160 times more hard drive memory than RAM (memory).
3. The 32bit motherboards in today's computers can't hold (nor efficiently use) more than 4 GB of onboard RAM. The mother boards don't provide enough RAM slots, and the 32bit architecture has a 4GB RAM limitation that requires inefficient rigging to overcome.

These limitations may seem insurmountable but there are already companies who are making RAM memory products that are overcoming these limitations (See Rocket Drive)

The Under Utilization of RAM

The first time I ever added additional RAM to one of my computers, I was amazed at how much it enhanced the performance of the machine. I would rather have a slower processor with plenty or RAM, than a super fast processor with minimal RAM. When I noticed how much additional RAM enhanced performance, I got in the habit of purchasing as much RAM as my computer's motherboard would hold. 

That's when I began to notice how, under utilized my RAM was. The operating system, and the programs I was running had 80% more RAM than they were programmed to utilized. Here are just couple of examples where I noticed my RAM wasn't being utilized:

• It would anger me when I would click on the start menu and have to wait for the menu's contents to be retrieved from the hard drive. I would think to myself, "here I've got all this RAM available for the operating system to use, and it's using my slowest memory (hard drive memory) to propagate some of my most commonly performed tasks."
• I would make an edit to a 100MB WAV audio file, and then I'd have to listen and wait while the hard drive churned in the background. Why did the programmers of this application not consider using all the RAM I had for the editing process?

Each time I would notice myself waiting on my hard drive it would anger me that my RAM wasn't being utilized. My machine was capable of doing tasks much faster, but I was limited by the programmers who didn't opt to check for and utilized the RAM I had available.

I found myself looking for ways to make these applications use RAM instead of hard drive memory. The applications I was running didn't have such options, and my operating system offered very limited access to the RAM. I thought to myself, I wish there was a way I could partition this RAM to act like it was a hard drive so I could fool these dumb applications into running faster by utilizing this RAM I have. I searched around and found a great software that allows you to do just that: DATARAM RAM DISK (also see competing product: SoftPerfect RAM Disk).

With RAM Disk I was able to turn RAM that my system never utilized into a "RAM Disk Drive". It did this so well, as a matter of fact, that when I clicked on "My Computer" it would list my RAM drive right there beside my other drives. I was able to give it a drive letter and everything. After doing this I was able to write files and install programs to RAM just like I normally would to my hard drive.

Everything I put on the RAM disk ran super fast. The software allows you to periodically backup the RAM to the hard drive. When you do a windows reboot or shutdown, all files on the RAM drive can be set to automatically be backed up on the hard drive. When your system comes back up the files are reloaded into RAM. I've found this program to be very stable, and I've never had any files get corrupted in the years I've been using it.

There is one limitation that RAM Disk has to deal with, however; motherboards only have a certain number of RAM slots, and once they are filled up you can't add any more RAM. Your RAM Disk can't be larger than the amount of excess RAM you have on your motherboard. Well, that use to be a limitation, but Cenatek then developed the Rocket Drive.

The Rocket Drive

The Cenatek Rocket Drive is a device I'd like to see in every computer. The Rocket Drive (that Wilson Vick and I evaluated) was a PCI card that had RAM slots on it. It allowed you to put up to 4GB of RAM on the card. The card installed really easy; you just plug it into one of the PCI slots on your motherboard.

Once fully installed the Rocket Drive shows up under "My Computer" (just like an additional hard drive would). The Rocket Drive is way faster than a hard drive. It is so fast that we failed to push it to it's limits during our evaluation:

When I tried to test to see how fast the Rocket Drive could send a large file to a computer I was running RAM Disk on, the Rocket Drive was so fast at transferring the file that it maxed out my 100Mb ethernet card's capacity. My ethernet card became the bottleneck!. Normally the hard drive would be the bottleneck.

We installed (the 3D game) Quake 3 directly on the Rocket Drive. Normally, with a hard drive, it would taken about 9 seconds for the game to load a game map; with the Rocket Drive game maps loaded in less than a second.

We used the Rocket Drive to compose a multi-track audio recording. We were recording at a very write intensive quality (48,000Hz 32 bit Stereo). The Rocket drive performed flawlessly. With hard drives, I've had trouble recording at these high qualities (especially while recording a new track and playing previous tracks at the same time). I've had hard drives that would skip parts or my recording because it was just too much data to write in real time.

Also, when you record audio, at this intensively high quality, you better have a long microphone cable if you plan to use a hard drive. I've made recordings where you can hear an overwhelmed hard drive churning loudly in the background. With the Rocket Drive, the machine was very quite during the recording.

Audio and Video editing is quicker with the Rocket Drive too. If you've ever used an audio or video editing program that insists on rewriting the entire file when you delete a segment from the beginning or middle of a production, you know how frustrating it can be to wait on the hard drive to get done each time you do this. The Rocket Drive can perform hard drive intensive operations like this in a fraction of the time.

Update

According to Wikipedia, On 9 October 2008, Cenatek was purchased by Dataram Corporation.

Conclusion

Computers today are under utilizing RAM and they are using hard drives too directly. In the future, if hard drives remain in our computers, they will be used as a backup device for what exists in RAM

Since RAM is so much faster than a hard drive, I predict that one day everything you do on your computer will be done in RAM first, and then behind the scenes the hard drive will backup what you've done in RAM. This will maximize the user's experience. Rather, than waiting on the hard drive, the user will be able to move onto his next task just as soon as the task is quickly completed in RAM.

Until then, we've got Cenatek products such as RAM Disk, and the Rocket Drive to empower us to choose RAM NOW to complete tasks that would normally be a hard drive bottleneck.

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