Samsung RAPID mode?

[Benjeh]

Is it worth it in 2018 the only write up i can find on it is from 2013? My boot up etc doesnt seem any faster with it enabled and i lose some RAM cos of it?

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

[Sakkura]

It uses system RAM to increase performance. The actual benefit in practice is limited in most cases. As for booting, that will not be affected because the files have to be loaded from the actual SSD, the RAM starts off empty.

 

I would say it isn't worth it, since you lose some RAM capacity and because there's a small risk of data loss if the system loses power.

[Benjeh]

1 minute ago, Sakkura said:

It uses system RAM to increase performance. The actual benefit in practice is limited in most cases. As for booting, that will not be affected because the files have to be loaded from the actual SSD, the RAM starts off empty.

 

I would say it isn't worth it, since you lose some RAM capacity and because there's a small risk of data loss if the system loses power.

Cheers man.

[TechyBen]

Boot times are sometimes slower with RAM cache solutions, as the data must be loaded into the RAM, and most wait for it to complete at boot (IIRC even Intel Optain does this, but only on first boot, subsequent boots are quicker). The speed of the system depends on your use case. A webpage opening in 1ms instead of 2ms may not be noticeable (as you say, in the past it made a difference of a quarter of a second vs half a second, so felt snappier). Game load times may not be that different either, but I guess we'd need to test or find examples (did LTT do this at one point?).

 

It may be worth it in some instances. Such as running older games where you may want a RAM disk for extra performance. But most use cases, the SSD will be quick enough, and Windows will allocate cache to RAM as and when it needs to.

 

If I get my PC test/skunk/frankenstein systems up and running (waiting on a 4gb ram stick today XD ) I'm hopefully gonna do some tests and benchmarks on this. Default vs software cache (samsung and/or paid for options) vs RAM over SSD, or RAID SSD over RAM etc. Why? Well, there are sometimes cheap sticks of ram, or cheap SSDs... so I want to know if chucking a bunch together as a scratch disk/cache is worth it.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

When I tried Rapid a few years ago, I was not impressed. It just didn't make a difference for me so I disabled it.