Ramdisk... worth it ?

[brianthesnail]

Hi guys
im currently using 4gb of ddr3 ram(1333mhz) ,however im upgrading to 16gb since theres a great deal on at the moment ... would running a 10gb ramdisk be worth it... this would leave me with 6gb of ram ( which is 2gb more than im currently using and still more than enough for windows 7 64bit and games
and what could you use a 10gb ramdisk for....

 

[raytseng]

if you don't have a task where you are waiting forever for disk, then it's not worth it.

Windows 7 (if you don't have an ssd) will already cache stuff to ram with prefetch/superfetch. so it is sort of "sped-up" already...

That being said, if you have the expendable cash, just get the ram for the sake of getting it, but you don't need to setup ramdisk software specifically.

 

[getochkn]

I don't find a big advantage from them for most things. If you are doing lots of photo editing in photoshop, using one as your scratch disk may help but then having 16GB of ram would allow photoshop to load the whole photo and not need a scratch disk. lol.

Windows 7 caching actually does a really good job of caching recently loaded things into memory already, hence they are already there. I tried before, setting up a ramdisk for my battlefield, installed there, thinking my maps would load 1000times faster and I'd be in the game before anyone else.

On first boot after Windows, the game may have loaded a few seconds faster, but after playing, Windows cached all the files needed in ram anyways and there was no difference and way too much of a hassle setting it up to work on the ramdisk.

Ramdisks get shutdown on reboot so using them for anything sensitive is a no-no, since a power failure, windows update reboot, blue screen, etc, can kill it at any moment.