Thinkpads Forum

I'm building a frankenpad. I've gotten to the drive systems.

I've got a Crucial M4 SSD on the way to use in a dual-drive config with my 1TB WD HDD.

I'm planning to use some linux distro on it and move my windows xp/7 installs to a virtual manager such as virtualbox or vmware.

I have occasional use for windows that I can't work around, and the vm seems like a good solution for those instances without having a bare metal install around to maintain.

Does anyone have any subjective experience with the benefits of 8GB or ram over 4GB on such an install?

I currently have 4GB and if there's a significant benefit in this use case, i'll pursue more ram, but if it's minimal, i won't.

4GB might not be enough if you ever need to run the XP VM and the Win7 VM at the same time, and still leave enough RAM available for the host OS. Keeping in mind that the 64bit systems will need more RAM than 32bit.

I think it's fairly unlikely i would need both VM's at the same time. The XP use case is relatively light, just control software for industrial controllers that don't have W7 clients. W7 would be just general use and a couple of light games.

86turbodsl wrote:Does anyone have any subjective experience with the benefits of 8GB or ram over 4GB on such an install?

The Frankenpad i use has 2x4=8GB of RAM and a 64bit Debian Linux as its main OS. This RAM amount indeed does make sense during the rare occasion running a VM or two via KVM/virt-manager or VirtualBox while still keeping my usual daily programs (web browsers and mail client) running in the background, mostly preventing the system from swapping. But other than that, 2x2=4GB would be plenty enough for my daily standard needs.

I bought those 4GB RAM modules a few years ago when they were still much more affordable than is the case today. Given today's insane prices for DDR2 RAM, i probably would rather adapt my usage patterns to 2x2=4GB RAM than wasting so much hard earned money into 2x4GB for so little gain, and rather invest that into a bigger or second SSD. Swapping to an SSD is by the way much less painful than it used to be with a HDD.

rumbero wrote:
I bought those 4GB RAM modules a few years ago when they were still much more affordable than is the case today. Given today's insane prices for DDR2 RAM, i probably would rather adapt my usage patterns to 2x2=4GB RAM than wasting so much hard earned money into 2x4GB for so little gain, and rather invest that into a bigger or second SSD. Swapping to an SSD is by the way much less painful than it used to be with a HDD.

If by that last statement you mean the swap partition on the SSD, I figured that was a very bad usage for an SSD. Since I do plan to use an SSD, I'm interested in your rationale for using an SSD for swap space. Can you explain further?

86turbodsl wrote:If by that last statement you mean the swap partition on the SSD, I figured that was a very bad usage for an SSD. Since I do plan to use an SSD, I'm interested in your rationale for using an SSD for swap space. Can you explain further?

There is not much to be explained further. For me, a SSD fully replaces a HDD, and i use it as primary storage device (apart of bulk data which goes on an external HDD). Of course this includes a swap partition. While the notion of "bad usage for an SSD" is theoretically of certain merit, personally i bought the SSD for actual real life usage, and which includes the occasional swapping. So what?

Make sure you buy an MLC based SSD to get the most write endurance out of your money, and then just use it. I am still using old Samsung 470 and Intel G2 Postville SSD drives in my Thinkpads for that very reason. Hardware eventually dies, so just replace it.

On my machine, running the Samsung Rapid on my 840Pro and launching a fully up to date XP vm with 1024MB dedicated to it, see around 70-80% ram usage.

Samsung Rapid uses around 1GB of ram
XP Mode uses 1GB of ram

Leaves me with 2GB of ram for 7 x64... I think I'm going to have to upgrade to 8GB soon.

86turbodsl wrote:without having a bare metal install around to maintain.

On my desktop, I run a dual boot with Ubuntu and Win 7 Ultimate (like many, I am trying to move to OSS, except for well, you know, video games ). Then in my case, it turned out I needed to run our old Access 2000 based company database in XP. Well, luckily for me, a copy of XP is included within the higher grades of Win 7. It runs as a VM within Win 7.

The reason I say this is because my experience has been that it is just like "maintaining" another machine. By that I mean I have installed A/V software, all the Windows updates, etc. It's just like another computer, it might as well be a "bare metal" installation, as you say.

IMO, playing video games inside a Win 7 VM, inside another OS, would be inefficient. Video games in particular tend to use a lot of resources. You may want to consider doing what I have, dual booting Win 7 and your Linux distro, and then using the XP VM inside Win 7 when needed. You could probably get away with a little less RAM that way too.

I agree that "more RAM is always nice" but I haven't been in the market for DDR2 lately. If it is a bit high right now, then this might be another way for you to get by until DDR2 prices come down again (if they do?).

I cannot speak specifically to your question about 4 vs 8 GB, as I am still running T4xR5x and looking to get all my machines to the max 2x1GB = 2GB of DDR(1)! Now DDR(1) is starting to get a bit steep (relative to the value of the machines I am putting it in), market prices for 1GB sticks are around $20 apiece currently. I keep hearing people saying "DDR3 is less than DDR2" but a quick check on Pricewatch shows that those are very close in price? I am not seeing that much of a difference but I am far from expert in that area.