Upcoming technology, HDD replacement makes it

[spenser.d]

Wow dude. You have absolutely no idea how hardware works, do you.

-Spenser

[jjrambo]

Data from the SSD/HDD gets into RAM IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY.

Through I/O controllers....

And just because you have a nice big powerful computer, doesn't mean everyone does. If you can't seem to understand my post, stop trying to make yourself look intelligent.

The vast majority of people at the moment have HDDs, and the vast majority of people will continue having HDDs for 5 years at a minimum. Just because you don't notice any performance difference, doesn't mean others won't.

The other benefit of Superfetch is the hardrive doesn't have to be constantly spun up, and this is a power saving benefit for people with laptops. Windows loads, say word, IE, excel is loaded into memory. The hardrive can now be spun down and running at a very low power, compared to without superfetch. Without superfetch say the guy opened Word, then the drives spun down, and 20mins later he opened up Excel, the hardrives now have to spin up and excel will take longer to load [oh look a performance benefit also, who would have thought...] and this also wastes battery life. With superfetch, it learns what you use most and automatically loads into memory the instant your computer turns on...

---

According to your logic, why don't we just use Cache memory (which I believe is NAND?) for everything? It's the fastest possible...and yes even faster than RAM. Hell screw that, lets just make processors that have 1tb caches...there no need for ram...sadly thats not how computers work, maybe on your planet they do..but on Earth we're still way behind.

And still Windows XP outperforms Windows Vista without superfetch, where load time is faster. Can you explain that?

With or without superfetch HDD still needs to load the files into memory. The only difference between computer with superfetch and without is scheduling, when to load.

You are saying Word, IE, Excell is loaded into memory. Well dude it's not gonna load with no reason but it follows user pattern of computer usage. In order to load Word, IE and Excell it still needs HDD to load into memory. It's not gonna show up in the memory from the **** who knows what place. Now, it wont load whole app but fragments which means it still have to load other stuff from HDD. Behind superfetch is a nice idea but its implementation is pointless.

Anyway Vista on old HDD 5400RPM is ****ing disaster. It's not something i made up but maybe you should listen the experience of billions users world wide. Btw. I hope many of you can learn that Microsoft way is not necessary a right way neither the concept of PC we use today is a right concept, far from it. Of course a lot of good things happened to PC and a lot of good things came from Microsoft. I'm not bashing anybody, but it's known fact that are millions of hours, billions of dollars are wasted every year because of Microsoft software. Think about that...

Edited May 13, 2008 by jjrambo

[Doli]

And still Windows XP outperforms Windows Vista without superfetch, where load time is faster. Can you explain that?

With or without superfetch HDD still needs to load the files into memory. The only difference between computer with superfetch and without is scheduling, when to load.

You are saying Word, IE, Excell is loaded into memory. Well dude it's not gonna load with no reason but it follows user patern of computer usage. In order to load Word, IE and Excell it still needs HDD to load into memory. It's not gonna show up in the memory from the **** who knows what place. Now, it wont load whole app but fragments which means it still have to load other stuff from HDD. I will prove to you all that Windows XP still executes things faster then Vista.

... Xp doesnt beat Vista in everything. Superfetch has shown good results for me.

To do what you are saying we would need a new CPU/motherboard architecture to ret rid of ram but why do that because even DDR2-400 beats SATA 300. We would need one hell of an jump in SSD transfer speed.

Edited May 13, 2008 by Doli

[Mr. Gibs]

And still Windows XP outperforms Windows Vista without superfetch, where load time is faster. Can you explain that?

With or without superfetch HDD still needs to load the files into memory. The only difference between computer with superfetch and without is scheduling, when to load.

You are saying Word, IE, Excell is loaded into memory. Well dude it's not gonna load with no reason but it follows user pattern of computer usage. In order to load Word, IE and Excell it still needs HDD to load into memory. It's not gonna show up in the memory from the **** who knows what place. Now, it wont load whole app but fragments which means it still have to load other stuff from HDD. Behind superfetch is a nice idea but its implementation is pointless.

Anyway Vista on old HDD 5400RPM is ****ing disaster. It's not something i made up but maybe you should listen the experience of billions users world wide. Btw. I hope many of you can learn that Microsoft way is not necessary a right way neither the concept of PC we use today is a right concept, far from it. Of course a lot of good things happened to PC and a lot of good things came from Microsoft. I'm not bashing anybody, but it's known fact that are millions of hours, billions of dollars are wasted every year because of Microsoft software. Think about that...

Sigh....obviously it loads it from the HDD you ****ing ****head. BUT IT LOADS IT BEFORE THE USER USES IT. Therefore, the hardrives don't need to be spun-up and nor does the user have to wait as long when he decides to use the program

And really Vista runs like **** on a 5400 rpm hardrive yeh...please explain to me how my laptop with 2x 5400 rpm hardrives runs vista fine? And my old laptop with 1x 5400rpm ran Vista fine? And both ran it faster than XP?

Prefetching isn't something radically new...its there in a lot of OSes...even XP has it...except Vista's version is more advanced in that it learns overtime.

[Lord Nite]

Do you honestly believe that SSD's will take the place of superfetch in the future?? What do you think superfetch uses to make the service work? A SSD Flash Drive!

I seriously doubt that SSD drives will become faster then RAM any time soon. Like razorfold said, they have to jump through hoops of I/O controllers and various pathways, so there is no chance they will become faster than RAM.

[Mr. Gibs]

Do you honestly believe that SSD's will take the place of superfetch in the future?? What do you think superfetch uses to make the service work? A SSD Flash Drive!

I seriously doubt that SSD drives will become faster then RAM any time soon. Like razorfold said, they have to jump through hoops of I/O controllers and various pathways, so there is no chance they will become faster than RAM.

You actually got 2 windows vista components mixed up ;)

SuperFetch is just an advanced prefetcher, and doesn't need a flash drive.

ReadyBoost uses a flash drive as a temporary disk cache.

In a way they are similar and work together but still different. =)

[+BudMan MVC]

eBay. ;)

where on ebay??? Does this look like $50 to you???

Even if you could win the bid on the lowest one at the current bid price, your still looking at 2x what he stated the price was. So again I ask -- were can you find 32GB flash drives for $50.. Other than out of some guys trunk that fell off a truck?? ;)

[Lord Nite]

You actually got 2 windows vista components mixed up ;)

SuperFetch is just an advanced prefetcher, and doesn't need a flash drive.

ReadyBoost uses a flash drive as a temporary disk cache.

In a way they are similar and work together but still different. =)

My fault. Was at work when I typed that up, and was a little distracted.

[soldier1st]

Readyboost Would help On slower HDD's and on systems with low ram,with superfetch it puts your memory to use while xp's prefetch only did when you accesed stuff,i would like to see some real results where xp is clearly faster than vista,on older hardware xp clearly wins but on newer hardware depending on what you run...superfetch is trying it's best to keep stuff in the faster ram instead of the slower hdd and the more ram you got the more efficient superfetch is.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Sigh...

jjrambo - It is clear that you do not understand how RAM works, or how SuperFetch works. SSDs will not replace RAM. Not unless you want your computer to get immensely slower overnight. SSDs are flash drives, they are not RAM drives. The read/write performance characteristics of SSDs are at best in the same ballpark as hard drives. A few super-super-expensive drives that aren't even really available yet will be able to beat the best conventional hard drives by a small amount. That's great, as I/O is a major bottleneck. But the increase isn't even 1/1000th of the way to closing the gap between HDD and RAM for R/W performance. Nevermind the fact that read/write bandwidth is only one of the reasons we use RAM (there are plenty of others).

RAM is not going away. SSDs provide substantial gains when it comes to seek times (they don't really even have "seek" times), which eventually will yield important gains. Unfortunately, just taking the Vista OS and installing it on an SSD actually gets you a significant performance penalty. You see, current OSes aren't designed to take advantage of the benefits of SSDs - and there are lots of drawbacks to SSD (like the delay when reflashing bits) that current OSes aren't designed to accomodate. On the other hands, HDDs have been very very heavily optimized. Even if and when SSDs replace hard drives, or at least take over the OS + app data storage role, it will take a little while before software starts to be optimized for that setup.

Since RAM isn't going away (probably ever), SuperFetch won't be going away either. SuperFetch is a significant improvement to the Windows memory management system. I am befuddled by your apparent dislike of it. What could possibly compel you to not want SuperFetch? If you have data that has been swapped to disk, and memory becomes available, why would you not want to swap it back in during idle cycles?

SuperFetch is just an advanced prefetcher, and doesn't need a flash drive.

SuperFetch is nothing like the prefetcher. They serve different purposes and work in completely different ways.

[Mr. Gibs]

SuperFetch is nothing like the prefetcher. They serve different purposes and work in completely different ways.

Well you are both right and wrong:

Prefetching: When you run a program on the computer, the program will request file.x and file.y from the disk that it loads into memory. What prefetching does is it watches the program launch a few times and finds patterns - "Look, application1 ask for those three files every time, lets load them". The advantage to this is that with the normal load there might be a few milliseconds wait between each request for a file, but with prefetch there is no waiting time at all and it all gets done before the application asks for it.

Superfetching: See above; except for your most used applications these things NEVER leave memory. So if you run Internet Explorer every minute of the day, when you do close it, the application will quit but the graphics and other things IE uses will be left, the next time you run IE and it requests those files the memory manager will say "OK loaded, here you go"; and give it the pre-loaded files already in memory.... Because disk access is crazy slow compared to RAM you will see a nice big jump in speed but with a very large memory usage to hold all this data.

SuperFetch is basically a Prefetcher with a more agressive algorithm, in that rather than just loading parts of the program, it loads the entire program into it. Probably in a basic sense you can call it an upgrade to the prefetcher in XP

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Well you are both right and wrong:

Wait... which of us writes code in Windows? I forget.

SuperFetch is basically a Prefetcher with a more agressive algorithm, in that rather than just loading parts of the program, it loads the entire program into it. Probably in a basic sense you can call it an upgrade to the prefetcher in XP

The prefetcher exists to streamline the loading of libraries during application start-up. It reduces the number of hard faults (and entrance into the kernel and I/O driver) during the initial start-up of an application. When "wmplayer.exe" is started, Windows tells the prefetcher, which loads up everything that wmplayer.exe used the last time it ran in one shot. Basically, wmplayer.exe walks in the door and the prefetcher says, "Here, I think you'll need this."

SuperFetch is nothing like that. SuperFetch has two purposes:

• Better swap management. When memory is swapped to the disk on Windows XP, it stays there until somebody asks for it again. Then they hit a page fault, and have to block until the pages can be swapped back in (which can mean spinning up the disk, or at the very least a slow seek to the data before it can even be read).
  If you have Outlook, Firefox, Word, and a bunch of apps running they're all usually pretty responsive. Then when you play a game like COD4 or something, all of those programs and their libraries + data get swapped to disk so that COD4 can make use of all your RAM. Now when you quit the game, all that memory is free. But Outlook, Firefox, and your other apps (even Explorer probably) have been written out to the page file. So when you click on them to do something, they hang while all their data is swapped back into memory.
  On Vista, when you exit the game, SuperFetch notices that all this data is in the page file, and all this RAM is sitting around empty. So it basically "pokes" that data in the page file and tells it to get its butt back into RAM - so that when you click on Outlook or Firefox, they don't hang.
  
• Disk Caching. SuperFetch also augments the disk caching mechanism that has been in Windows forever. In Windows XP, when you run wmplayer.exe or open a .doc file for the first time, it has to be read from the disk into memory. But if you close it and open it again, it will be far faster. You probably won't even hear the disk working at all. That's because wmplayer.exe or something.doc has been cached into otherwise unused parts of RAM.
  However, the disk cache in XP was relatively small, and wouldn't scale well to high memory machines. Vista fixes that, and will basically use all your unused memory as a disk cache. Now that you have all this cache space, why not fill it with something? SuperFetch aims to make it so that even the first launch of wmplayer.exe or load of something.doc will be faster. It does this by populating the cache in advance, during idle time (mainly noticeable after you reboot).
  It also has some rather complicated logic designed by some researchers that allows it to figure out your usage patterns - so that it can pre-populate the right data before you even ask for it. That's just icing on the cake, though. All the other functionality of SuperFetch is going to be helpful even if those complicated heuristics for predicting your usage fail. And they don't fail, since it knows you use Firefox a lot, and will work to make sure it's always ready to launch faster.
  

Edited May 13, 2008 by Brandon Live

[mad_onion]

Wait... which of us writes code in Windows? I forget.

lol i'm surprised how much patience you have with people who clearly know a lot less about the topic than you but still manage to be patronising.

to go to the effort of posting this information when people are this annoying is impressive. i don't think i could do it.

[j.r.l.]

And still Windows XP outperforms Windows Vista without superfetch, where load time is faster. Can you explain that?

With or without superfetch HDD still needs to load the files into memory. The only difference between computer with superfetch and without is scheduling, when to load.

You are saying Word, IE, Excell is loaded into memory. Well dude it's not gonna load with no reason but it follows user pattern of computer usage. In order to load Word, IE and Excell it still needs HDD to load into memory. It's not gonna show up in the memory from the **** who knows what place. Now, it wont load whole app but fragments which means it still have to load other stuff from HDD. Behind superfetch is a nice idea but its implementation is pointless.

Anyway Vista on old HDD 5400RPM is ****ing disaster. It's not something i made up but maybe you should listen the experience of billions users world wide. Btw. I hope many of you can learn that Microsoft way is not necessary a right way neither the concept of PC we use today is a right concept, far from it. Of course a lot of good things happened to PC and a lot of good things came from Microsoft. I'm not bashing anybody, but it's known fact that are millions of hours, billions of dollars are wasted every year because of Microsoft software. Think about that...

<snipped>...don't want a warning

Vista has better IO capabilities than XP, period. Take a look at this http://www.tech-hounds.com/article29/ArticlesPage2.html

By the way data gets from the harddrive to the memory by the IO controllers... why do you think it's plugged into the motherboard / IDE / SATA controller?

Data gets from memory to the processor by the various buses, FSB / HyperTransport etc.

SSD = Storage

RAM = Cache

Capiche?

Your arguing is pointless.

Edited May 13, 2008 by Jay R.

[+BudMan MVC]

I have to say this has been a most enjoyable thread ;) But stilling waiting for the link to where you can get 32GB flash drives for $50 :rofl:

[jjrambo]

Do you honestly believe that SSD's will take the place of superfetch in the future?? What do you think superfetch uses to make the service work? A SSD Flash Drive!

I seriously doubt that SSD drives will become faster then RAM any time soon. Like razorfold said, they have to jump through hoops of I/O controllers and various pathways, so there is no chance they will become faster than RAM.

Jumping through hoops of IO controllers is not a problem at all. A lot of people forget that HDD is still mechanical device for good part. Trust me....some future ROM/SSD through hoops of I/O controller along with fast RAM is hell of speed. As I said it's not like SSD will replace HDD tomorrow, and by the time that happens heck it wont be even SSD but something as fast as memory. ROM anybody?

The history of PC showed that any software (acceleration) solution was replaced by hardware. Superfetch will die, the bottom line it has no future on the long run. I don't think that even DVD-ROM has a future in sense we use today. What will happen is that all your software and games etc you will get through the Internet (Network).

In 20 years from now we will be running basically Terminals.

[ViperAFK]

And still Windows XP outperforms Windows Vista without superfetch, where load time is faster. Can you explain that?

With or without superfetch HDD still needs to load the files into memory. The only difference between computer with superfetch and without is scheduling, when to load.

You are saying Word, IE, Excell is loaded into memory. Well dude it's not gonna load with no reason but it follows user pattern of computer usage. In order to load Word, IE and Excell it still needs HDD to load into memory. It's not gonna show up in the memory from the **** who knows what place. Now, it wont load whole app but fragments which means it still have to load other stuff from HDD. Behind superfetch is a nice idea but its implementation is pointless.

Anyway Vista on old HDD 5400RPM is ****ing disaster. It's not something i made up but maybe you should listen the experience of billions users world wide. Btw. I hope many of you can learn that Microsoft way is not necessary a right way neither the concept of PC we use today is a right concept, far from it. Of course a lot of good things happened to PC and a lot of good things came from Microsoft. I'm not bashing anybody, but it's known fact that are millions of hours, billions of dollars are wasted every year because of Microsoft software. Think about that...

You have no clue what you are talking about.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Jumping through hoops of IO controllers is not a problem at all. A lot of people forget that HDD is still mechanical device for good part. Trust me....some future ROM/SSD through hoops of I/O controller along with fast RAM is hell of speed. As I said it's not like SSD will replace HDD tomorrow, and by the time that happens heck it wont be even SSD but something as fast as memory. ROM anybody?

Uhh, SSDs are ROM.

The history of PC showed that any software (acceleration) solution was replaced by hardware. Superfetch will die, the bottom line it has no future on the long run.

That statement is entirely meaningless. We have had caches for a long time, and they won't be going away any time soon. If hard drives or SSDs or whatever become as fast as RAM in every way, then there will be something far faster that is more expensive - so it will be used in smaller quantities just as we use RAM today. I expect this will be true pretty much forever.

I don't think that even DVD-ROM has a future in sense we use today. What will happen is that all your software and games etc you will get through the Internet (Network).

In 20 years from now we will be running basically Terminals.

Maybe. They said that 20 years ago, though. Still hasn't happened. Any predictions along these lines are just as reliable as the predictions from the past that said we'd all have flying cars right now.

Even if all of your data storage goes away from the local machine, you will STILL have something like a hard drive on the other end of the network connection. That is, a slower but more capacious permenant storage solution than what is in your local computer (which would be RAM or an equivalent).

It's simple economics. There will always be a faster storage technology that costs too much to purchase in large capacities. So for a long time we will likely continue to use a tiered memory solution as we use today.

RAM isn't going away. CPU caches aren't going away. SuperFetch and things like it aren't going away.

I don't know what SuperFetch ever did to you... but I am sure it is sorry.

[soldier1st]

jjrambo has no clue about superfetch,jjrambo if i were you i would do alot of research so you can back up your claims with real facts instead of made up nonsense.