petefbi

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Dec 31, 2009
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I recently upgraded my gaming PC to 16Gb of Ram and decided to utilise some of the unused Ram by making a 10Gb ramdisk and installing a couple of games to it.
When booting, windows took (using HDD) about 5 mins to carve out the ramdisk and about a minute to shutdown (using a 7200 speed HDD).

I picked up a Mushkin Chronos (not the deluxe) 120Gb SSD and have it now as the Primary drive for the PC (running windows 7). Speed boost for regular startups and shutdowns is incredible.
But when I set up the ramdisk again (10Gb with it's backup file stored on the SSD) there seems to be hardly any difference in the startup or shutdown times than when I was using a regular HDD.

One thing I've seen is that (in both SSD and HDD configurations) during startup, the LED for drive activity is *not* going nuts. Usually when there's a lot of activity its very bright, but it only glows dimly, when preparing the ramdisk, whether it's on the SSD or HDD.
Is there some other bottleneck (with the software) that makes it pointless to use an SSD to carve out the ramdisk quicker?

PC;
AMD Phenom II BE @ 3.5ghz
Gigabyte UD3 990FXA mobo
16Gb Corsair Vengeance (10Gb configured for Ram drive)
Mushkin Chronos 120Gb SSD
Windows 7 64bit Ultimate.
Superspeed Ramdisk Plus 10.
 
Solution
Have you tried any different ramdisk software?
I did a quick google and there's one called eboostr, and people say it doesn't slow startup times.

petefbi

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Haven't tried any others yet.
Guess the next one on my list was DataRam's Ramdisk. Anyone else any thoughts on why I might be seeing this delay, or any other recommended ramdisk vendors?

Cheers
 

psaus

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If SSD performance is equal to HDD performance, I suspect Ramdisk is loading before the higher performance drivers start (e.g., AHCI and alike). Therefore the ATA/IO bus is running in a legacy/slow state during this "carve" time.
I've not touched RAM drive software in years, but might want to see if Ramdisk can be configured to load later in the boot process...