I recently bought a Samsung 840 EVO 500 gb solid state drive for my laptop. There's a feature (disabled by default) called RAPID (Real Time Acceleration Processing of I/O Data) Mode. From what I can tell, this mode will use more memory/RAM to facilitate better/faster read/write speeds. A white paper on this feature can be found here.
What is RAPID mode?
RAPID mode is paired exclusively with Samsung 840
EVO SSDs and available as a feature of the accompanying Samsung SSD
Magician Software Toolset (version 4.2 and later). When enabled, RAPID
mode is inserted as a filter driver in the Windows storage stack. The
driver actively monitors all storage-related activity between and
among the operating system, user applications and the SSD. The RAPID
technology analyzes system traffic and leverages spare system
resources (DRAM and CPU) to deliver read acceleration through
intelligent caching of hot data and write optimization through tight
coordination with the SSD.
So is it really worth enabling this feature? I have 8 gb of installed memory on my laptop (max that I can install). Is it worth this trade off of using some memory to improve speeds?
Best Answer
RAPID mode gives fantastically high results for benchmarks, where the test software just basically writes out data that it rereads later on. If the RAM cache is large enough, the test will only measure the RAM speed, rather than the disk speed.
For example, the Samsung 850 EVO 2TB Review article from August 2015 gives test results from three well-known products :
However, in everyday life we don't always re-read the data we have just written, so the results are vastly different.
I have found several user testimonies :
And the next remark :
Conclusion
Under normal everyday use, allocating up to 25% of your RAM to RAPID takes this memory away from Windows (and the same for Linux). Windows & Linux incorporate very good memory caching which I believe will better (and safer) handle everyday use. Especially as they use this RAM for more purposes than just as a disk buffer (programs, memory data etc.).
With RAPID, one also has higher chances of losing data when power is lost or when the computer crashes before a write has been completed and sent to the SSD, as RAM contents are then lost.
I would therefore not counsel using RAPID for normal computer usage.