SuperVolume (previously known as SuperSpeed)
is a sophisticated yet elegant solution to the disk I/O bottleneck. Employing
a patented hybrid cache, it mirrors an entire disk partition or volume
in RAM. In essence, a cache is created in RAM which maintains a one-to-one
relationship with its associated partition or volume. All data residing
in the partition or volume is also present in the cache. The file system,
drive letter, and all other attributes of the original partition or volume
are preserved.
How does SuperVolume accelerate a program?
If a program needs lots of data (e.g. images for a video game) it's
much faster to have it come from RAM than from disk. When running a
program with data on a SuperVolume partition or volume, the disk-related
delays and ‘hiccups’ normally experienced disappear! The
program is no longer hampered by slow disk access, instead it can run
smoothly at memory speed.
In addition, when a program needs to save information it will first
be saved to RAM. Then, in the background, SuperVolume will save these
changes back to the physical disk for safekeeping. Therefore the program's
disk I/O problem is greatly reduced, if not eliminated!
Write-through and write-deferred modes
SuperVolume supports write-through and write-deferred modes.
In write-through mode, writes are immediately sent to the cache and to
the disk. This eliminates the possibility of data loss in SuperVolume
due to a system crash or power failure. In write-deferred mode, writes
are immediately sent to the cache only, and then to the disk at a later
time. This mode of operation results in read- and write-performance similar
to that of RamDisk. SuperSpeed Software recommends enabling the write-deferred
(or lazy-write) feature ONLY on systems equipped with an Uninterruptible
Power Supply (UPS).
A key prerequisite for SuperVolume is to have, or create, a
hard drive partition that is small enough to fit intoavailable
physical memory. For example, a system with 1 GB of RAM
typically has around 700 MB available for SuperVolume. Therefore, a
700 MB disk partition or volume could be mirrored in RAM by SuperVolume.
Note: caution should be exercised to leave sufficient memory free for
the operating system, programs and services.
In the explanation above we talk about putting data (graphics, video,
database etc.) on the SuperVolume partition or volume. Why? Because
this data is the most frequently used. If there is enough RAM then entire
programs, like action games, can be installed there and accelerated!
Creating the separate disk partition or volume required by SuperVolume
may require the use of third-party disk partitioning software such as
Partition Magic®.
Support for NUMA
Windows XP x64 provides special support for machines with a non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA). When active on such platforms, the memory manager for SuperVolume examines the processor and memory affinities reported by Windows and the ACPI SRAT, and then optimizes physical memory allocations across the described NUMA nodes. The NUMA support in SuperVolume greatly improves the speed of memory allocations and equalizes the distribution of cache allocations among the NUMA nodes. Currently, NUMA support does not include the ability to build caches on specific nodes.
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