RAMDrive Users [Brainstorm]

[eroder]

What version of dism are you using? 

6.1.7601.17514 from win7 or 6.2.2900.16384 from win 8.

Has anybody tried to see if there is a speed increase between these?

Is it possible to use ver 6.2... on win7?

[Legolash2o]

I'm not fully sure but i think Windows 8 DISM is a lot faster than Windows 7 DISM. Windows 8 DISM also has extra features

[bphlpt]

But some of the newer features of Win8 DISM, such as the ability to fully remove a package from the source and yet still have it able to be re-added post install, unfortunately do not work in Win7 AFAIK.  So I guess testing would be needed to make sure that using Win8 DISM to make a Win7 build do not create any unforeseen consequences.  Worst case, I guess it could be added so that Win8 DISM is used for Win8 builds and Win7 DISM is used for Win7 builds?

 

Cheers and Regards

[crashfly]

I do like the idea of updating DISM to the Windows 8 version.  Even without the "extra" features inherent to Windows 8, it would be a speed improvement if the newer DISM works as fast as Legolash2o says it does.

[eroder]

I took over ownership of all dism files and dll's and overwritten them with the one's from Win8's toolkit. Now getting error when running dism. Will experiment some more.

[Legolash2o]

Is DISM still included with Win8 WAIK?

[eroder]

The one I download got it. Assessment and Deployment Kit  for Win 8.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-za/download/details.aspx?id=30652

Edited January 27, 2013 by eroder

[Stimpy]

No personal attack, but why are people asking this question ?

 

A average HDD read/writes about 100 MB/s.

A good SSD read/writes about 500 MB/s.

 

...and no one asks, if a SSD is faster than a HDD, but...

 

A average DDR3 (1600MHz) with 9-9-9-27 timings read/writes about 15000 MB/s

 

So why are there so many users asking, if a RAMDRIVE is faster than a SSD, or if it can make any sense using it ? :g:

 

Because just how many programs can actually use 20GB/s of a RAM Drive?  Nothing that WinToolkit does can even begin to approach those kind of speeds.  Most WinToolkit's operations are running at speeds less than 20MB/s.  The only operations that actually use a relatively high amount of bandwidth is the ISO creation, image building, mounting and saving tasks.  I'm doing an integration right now, and my Disk utilization peaks at 26%.  What worthwhile benefit would I get from going out, and Buying 32GB of RAM, and making a 24GB RAMDisk, and telling the Toolkit to use it?

 

It goes to show that a RAMDrive is not some kind of silver bullet that's suddenly going to make the Toolkit make Windows images in a few minutes instead of an hour.

 

The single biggest performance factor in relation to creating a Windows Image is actually disk access time, and random access time, not continuous disk bandwidth.

 

To put this in plain language, the biggest performance improvement to WinToolkit is to use a good SSD.  Yes you will get more performance from a VERY large (24GB) RAMDisk, but we are talking less than a 10% improvement for a fast computer with a good SSD.

Edited January 29, 2013 by Stimpy