Ram Disk who's using one

[gcode]

I just added 8 gig of ram to my home workstation

for a total of 11 gig installed.

I'm thinking of devoting 2 gig to a ram drive

for a Mastercam temp drive.

Has anyone tried this with Win 7 X64 yet??

Any advise for configuring my machine to take advantage of all this new memeory??

[Ron Branch @ Verisurf]

Tom, I just make sure I set affinity and have had no real problems to think of. I keep seeing the operations manager move on the 2nd screen but that is about it.

[Guest SAIPEM]

You can't with MCX.

 

MCX is still a 32-bit process so the most it will ever see is 4GB.

 

Creating a RAM Drive is worthless.

[gcode]

Sure you can.. I set one up over the weekend and routed my temp and regen files to it.

Didn't see much improvement though. The only really big improvement was the time it takes large solid models to shade. After the first shading, they shade instantly with a ram disk.

The big models I work with usually take 10 to 30 seconds to shade, even with fast video cards.

I was doing mostly advanced 5X toolpaths this

weekend and I don't think they use a temp file.

I didn't see any difference with the benchmark file but I'd forgotten to route regen files to ram when I ran the test.

If you had enough ram, you could install

X4 to the ram disk an run off of that. Then you create an image of the install and load it

to ram every time you start the machine.

I suspect that is way more trouble than its worth.

I think a good solid stade hard drive would

yeild similar results with a lot less hassle.

Here is the ram drive I was using.

They've got a free trial so you can experiement

without risking your cash

 

[ 03-08-2010, 07:54 AM: Message edited by: gcode ]

[Guest]

We benched a kickass system with a Solid State drive, 12 gigs RAM, we saw a slight improvement, about 10%, over process times but it really seems that the actual Mastercam process is what is the bottleneck at this point.

 

Multi-thread has been a nice addition, but, I think 2 things really need to happen. Mastercam needs to become a true multi-core product and the need to take advantage of the x64 architecture.

 

Tool path crunch times are relatively the same, they are happening in the background now, which is nice but still take too long to process.

 

I don't believe a RAM drive will offer you anything that a system with ample RAM can offer.

 

Just one fanboi's opinion

[Guest SAIPEM]

My response was to your statement about taking advantage of all the extra memory.

 

You can create one and it will do nothing.

MCX is still a 32-Bit process so the most it will ever see is 4GB.

 

A RAM drive doesn't change that.

[Rob @ Target Machine]

quote:

---

Multi-thread has been a nice addition, but, I think 2 things really need to happen. Mastercam needs to become a true multi-core product and the need to take advantage of the x64 architecture.

---

+1000 John

 

[The_Evil_Machinist]

quote:

---

Multi-thread has been a nice addition, but, I think 2 things really need to happen. Mastercam needs to become a true multi-core product and the need to take advantage of the x64 architecture.

---

This or switch to open source architectures like open CL or CUDA. The GPU is a lot more powerful than the CPU.

[Craig Madsen from CM3D]

With as much memory as you have, I think the OS is caching most of the data already.

 

IF you had 4gigs or less, and then allocated 1gig or so to temp and regen files, you would see a significant performance increase.

 

BUT, with a fast SSD (solid state drive) and routing ALL your temp files there, including your system pagefile, you will see a pretty good savings of time. (Your page file would ALSO have to be on the SSD to really save time - the OS still reads and writes that to your harddisk). Rather than a SSD, I have been using a 64gb SSD EXPRESSCARD and have routed ALL temp files there - it makes a very noticable difference - expecially when my stepson pulled it from my system during a reboot. (Surprising what you notice when your system suddenly gets slower).

 

So, unless you have memory to spare, and the cpu time to dedicate to maintaining it (Like a Quad core CPU), I think you will get better performance another way.

[Craig Madsen from CM3D]

By the way, even the 64Gb Expresscard is still way slower than a fast SSD Drive replacement. Access time about 1ms. versus .1-.5ms. The SUSTAINED throughput rate is the major difference with the SSD drives.