Ram disk drive

goodguy713

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i have a question .. how many of you have tried out or used a ram disk drive .. and why are they not really all that prevolent here .. I did some testing my self and found that i was getting read and write speeds on part with 8 sata 3 ssds in raid 0 .. i also did a test using a 4gb ram disk drive .. for comparrison and found that my wild fire ssd took on order of around 5 mins and then my standard hhd took almost 7 but when i used the ram disk it took 2mins 30 seconds do do the same work load 1gb file samuri harrem convert from vts to mp4 .. using hand break which was also installed on the ram disk image.. stupid fast so why dont people talk about this much.?
 

cbrunnem

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ummm i think it might be because when you shut off your computer YOU LOOSE EVERYTHING.
 

Wamphryi

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The issue is that most RAM configurations are not large enough to make RAM Drive useful. I run 16 GB RAM and I use RAM Drive but 4 GB RAM set ups do not leave much room to move. Also in the event that power fails you will lose any data in the RAM Drive. You can save an image of the RAM Drive at shut down but big RAM Drive files can take a while to load up at start up. If you have a 6 GB RAM Drive then 6 GB of data has to be written to RAM every boot up.

RAM Drive has some great specialised uses but for most users it is not that viable.
 

goodguy713

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well i was thinking about doing a 3930k build with 64 gigs of ram .. and having a ram drive partition .. for stuff like bf3 and a few other programs i use .. having the drive load from an ssd drive isnt so bad mechanical well id understand .. but thats a minor compared to the speed benefit.. do you think there would be any benefit to installing games on a ram drive?
 

goodguy713

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i also have 16GB of ram running a 1090t .. and looking back at toms benchmarks if you used a ram drive it would basically negate any performance benefit you might get from upgrading the cpu.. just my observation
 
What is RAMDisk?

RAMDisk is a program that takes a portion of your system memory and uses it as a disk drive.

Sounds simple? In concept yes, but in practice there are many tricky issues to deal with when operating a RAMDisk in Windows. We continue to work hard to make RAMDisk as easy as possible to use, but there is always room for improvement. We provide updates regularly to improve features and address customer requests. Please be sure to READ THE INSTRUCTIONS (this document) before you try the various RAMDisk settings.

How does it work?

RAMDisk is a kernel-level driver that presents a standard disk drive to the OS, however, it stores and retrieves data from the system RAM on your motherboard instead of an actual, physical disk. Along with the Kernel Driver is a GUI that talks to the driver and allows the user to set various options as well as start and stop the Driver (create or delete a RAMDisk).

The Driver has been written to WDM standards and creates a low-level disk object that Windows Device Manager and Disk Management are able to "see" and manage. You can partition, format, mount a volume, and assign multiple drive letters to RAMDisk (but only if you would know how to do those things with a regular disk, RAMDisk does not do it for you).

Upon successful Start of the RAMDisk, a kernel level driver (RAMDisk.sys) is loaded into the Windows/System32/drivers folder. This driver will be available to Windows each time RAMDisk starts. It is removed when RAMDisk is stopped.

What is the benefit?

In a word: SPEED!

Most users use RAMDisk to speed up applications like:
Browsers cache
RAM Cache for the HDD or SSD
Photoshop (scratch disk)
Databases
Internet Explorer cache for faster web surfing
Audio and Video editing
CAD programs
Software compilers
Speeding up CD duplication
Games
SETI processing
TEMP files
Swap space
Web server cache
Custom applications with high I/O, high bandwidth, or high security requirements

When I transfer 2GB file from the RAMdisc to my 2TB HDD it starts high around 1.2GB/s the transfer speed.

Than it goes down of course, but it takes -> one, two done!
 

goodguy713

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yea its just a curious question .. i was rather bored and remembered talking to an older guy about ram drives .. and did a bit of googling and found some old school stuff toms did a review on with ddr2 ram and thought well heck they have ddr3 at 2400mhz now i was just curious on what kind of speeds one could get .. i mean toms already seemed to prove that 1333 mhz ram is usually good enough but and minimal performance gains there on out .. but what about ram disk?
 
I think people tried it, and couple of years back it was crashing a lot, if it was set wrong.

So it probably deterred many users from keeping trying. Now it works fine on any W7.

There is probably 6 users I know on the forum that are using the drive.

I work with music and video and do my photography editing on RAMdisc.

16GB RAM is good to have, so user can use 8GB for RAM disc and have plenty for the system.

Once u try, u don't go back, if u don't have to.

 

goodguy713

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yea i know what you mean .. makes the lga 2011 set ups much more beneficial .. the wheels are turning you guys should look into possible benches if possible im sure it would make a great article. thanks for your time though .. yea with my set up doing an atto i was getting over 3GB sec .. i was like that cant be right until i did the video file conversion and was like??? OMG never again.. haha
 
Way faster than any drive and it cost next to nothing. Free to 4GB RAMdisc to start with.

ramdisc4gb.png
 
Windows automatically uses spare physical memory as a file system cache. You can see this in the Performance tab of Task Manager. It's nice to see on paper but Windows already does most of that work for you, you just don't see it. The biggest drawback is that the space taken up by the RAMDisk is committed to the RAMDisk application, it is no longer available to be committed to other applications like the Windows file system cache is.
 

goodguy713

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yea this is what i came up with i have 4x4GB corsair xms 3 .. now i used ASSD benchmark for this though.. pretty sick omg 11000 MB sec thats like I mean it would take 8 ssd drives to get this performance yet your set up is like 3 times more powerful.. sweet man
 

RAM disc is something different and u know that.

Run an application from RAMdisc or use the VM or scratch disk for media encoding.

There u will see the real difference. But only if u will try it yourself..

 

goodguy713

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pretty much got the same results .. the newer intels have quad channel right? maybe that is giving it a performance benefit .. my build is a 1090t with 16 GB of corsair xms 3 and a gigabyte ud5 890fx mother board i dont think the graphics setup would have any effect plus my ram is not overclocked .. so
 

goodguy713

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Im wondering if i changed the timing up on my ram weather it would have a significant impact or not .. but then again im guessing its the xmp profile that intel takes advantage of.. seeing as how thats dual channel.. ha ha considering i built this back in 2010 ... im surprised I have to admit im pretty much done with AMD at this point.. more then likely go with lga 2011 build next .. here in the next few months.
 

2011 would be for u significant jump in performance, from what u got now.

I upgraded from 6750 C2D 775 socket to 2600K, and man, that was way more than one could wish for.

Going from encoding 1080p HD in 28 hrs to 3.5hrs was significant for me.

And the 2011 six core CPU(even the ~$500) will knock the sock off the 2600K CPU.

The processing power is unmatched,

only dual xeon set up will knock that the 2011 down.
 

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