RAM disk

[Adcadet]

Anybody have experience with creating and using RAM disks? I recently found Dataram's ramdisk (free for <=4 GB) (link: http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk). Has a nice GUI, seems to work reasonably well. I've been playing around with creating Linux virtual machines on a RAM disk. The speed for my X25M-G2 is an order of magnitude faster than my Hitachi 7k2000, and a RAM disk is an order of magnitude faster than my X25M-G2.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

 

[Santilli]

David is probably the guy on this one. I've only used free programs, sometimes with stuff that only a clean install will cure.

I am using a ram disk on an XP install, on one of my Panasonic laptops. I use it for caching stuff for Firefox, and, it really speeds stuff up.

On another install, I have a disk I can't really use, but can't get rid of either.

For what it's worth, here is a test of one on the Beast:

The ram disk on my laptop tests in the 1200 MB/sec range. Same with my server.

However, since I can't boot from it, and, I don't have a motherboard that allows 128 gigs of ram, just put the stuff on an SSD and forget it.

What I always wanted was a bootable ram disk, which the Revo kind of resembles.

 

[Howell]

Within the VM you are using ram if you give the vm enough and the OS preloads file to keep you for hitting the disk. I'm running VMs off of a 7200rpm laptop drive and my primary VM runnig XP runs chrome and iTunes for applications. I can tell you that except for initial application startup you won't be able to tell a difference with a ram drive. Just give it enough memory and try not to close the applications.

As for the original question, I'm no help; I haven't implemented a ram drive in a long time.

 

[ddrueding]

I was doing RAM drives before SSDs came out. Getting some incredible speed; but capacity was stunningly expensive. I took my system to 24GB and made 12 of it a RAM disk for Photoshop (which at the time didn't have a 64-bit version).

Unless you are trying to work around limitations in older software packages, it isn't worth it.

 

[Handruin]

Anybody have experience with creating and using RAM disks? I recently found Dataram's ramdisk (free for <=4 GB) (link: http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk). Has a nice GUI, seems to work reasonably well. I've been playing around with creating Linux virtual machines on a RAM disk. The speed for my X25M-G2 is an order of magnitude faster than my Hitachi 7k2000, and a RAM disk is an order of magnitude faster than my X25M-G2.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

That's the one I've also used in the past. I've used it when testing out my network to see what the highest fill rate I could get when copying files from computer to computer. I wanted to remove the hard drive as the limitation and this was the best way I could find.

 

[Bozo]

Doesn't all the data on a RAM disk dissappear when you shut off the computer?

 

[Handruin]

Yes. I use it mainly as a tool for testing, not actual work I would need to rely on.

 

[ddrueding]

Doesn't all the data on a RAM disk dissappear when you shut off the computer?

There are a number of tools out there that re-create the RAM disk and re-populate it with files from a folder on another disk.

Someone at one point built a PCI card that held some DIMMs and a battery. IIRC, their second version was even bootable.

 

[LunarMist]

I've been using RAMDiks in all new systems since 2003. Nowadays most apps that need a large amount of RAM can access enough system memory in a 64-bit OS not to need a RAMDisk, but it can be useful for some apps that do not. Make sure to run tests with various settings.

 

[Adcadet]

With Datram's RAMDisk I can tell it to load an image from my mechanical HD when I start it up, and to save it to the mechanical HD when I turn it off. It will even save an image every X seconds. My machine has 16 GB of RAM, and I've got it setup now to create a 6 GB RAMDisk that has a Linux Mint installation with another 4 GB of RAM (so when after launching Linux Mint I've now used 10 GB of RAM; not sure it it really benefits from 4 GB of RAM when the "hard disk" is also in RAM). Mint on the RAMDrive is blazingly fast - booting up takes about 4 seconds versus 10 seconds when loading from my SSD versus about 45 seconds on my mechanical HD, although starting the RAMDrive, which includes loading the 6 GB image from the mechanical HD, takes about 75 seconds and about twice that to shutdown.

The RAM drive is fun to see how fast things can go, but for practical purposes, an SSD gets similar performance without the headache, and other than a slower boot time and initial application performance, giving a virtual machine sufficient RAM gets similar performance - exactly as Howell pointed out.

 

[Bozo]

I guess it's fun to play with, but I can't see the point these days. RAM is cheap and even the most mundane motherboards can support 16, 24, or more GBs of RAM.