raid for ram???

[lildude]

is it better to have one stick of 512MB of ram or two sticks of 256MB of ram? i heard someone once say that there was raid for ram. like one of the sticks could be reading at the same time the other stick is writing. i dunno, but if you have the info, then lemme know.

[arthur888]

There is something called ram interleaving which is comparable to raid, but I'm not sure if it is better to have 2 sticks instead of 1. I believe that sticks are doing this internally so it 's not necessary to have 2 sticks. Hope this helps,

Arthur

[Strawbs]

RAM Interleaving is important performance wise and it is better to have two seperate sticks of RAM than one for a couple of reasons, The first is performance (interleaving\striping) and the second is "redundancy", i.e. if one stick fails you can still work\play with the other one.

[arthur888]

I read something about interleaving with one stick on this site:

http://www.viahardware.com/faq/ka7/faqram.html

Maybe it's only possible in newer systems, I'm not sure about all this. Your second reason to have 2 sticks still stands ofcourse.

Arthur.

[brainwave64]

I once read a very in depth article on bank interleaving but I don't remember where I read it at. Bank interleaving is internal and whether or not you can use it is determined by each individual memory module. You don't need two sticks of RAM to use bank interleave. The only type of "RAID" for RAM that I know of is boards based on nVidia's new nForce chipset. If you have two sticks instead of one, you can double your memory throughput, though the real world increases for that chipset aren't very noticeable.

[arthur888]

If you remember the link some time, please post it. I'm very interested.

[brainwave64]

SDRAM Bank Interleaving - What is It? (http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?section=rwtlabs&AID=RWT110401204523)

[lildude]

thanx everyone for all of the posts. lots of information going on. :)

[baby_girl]

iwould always buy 1 stick, cos like brainwave sez, the performane difference is tiny. Plus 1 stick is cheaper than 2, and it takes up less space.

if u have 3 slots on ur mobo, with 256's in, you only have 768 mb, but if u have 512's u get 1536 instead: well worth it

;)

[lildude]

i just thought of a question. does this interleaving process make my ram any hotter, or does it not affect it in that way? thanx again.

[Strawbs]

If your FSB isn't o\c'ed, it won't be running any hotter than it's designed to and you only really need more than 1Gb for servers, I'm almost certain that "home" versions of windows (pre-XP) can't use more than about 768Mb max anyway. :)