Functions that benefit most in ramdisk

[klpapp]

Hello,
Am using a 1000MB ram drive on a 6GB Ram Win 7 system.

IE Temp file Cache, Tmp Caches in place and operational - Very impressive results.

TEMP variable points to R (Ram Drive) but cannot find any trace of TEMP activity. What have I overlooked?

Also what other cache intensive (like the above) non software specific functions can be placed in the Ram Drive?

One final question; How do I locate the C Drv Paging file on the R (Ram Drive) in a way such that it will be used for C Drv Page File Storage?

Can anyone advise or assist on the above?

Thanks - Keith

 

[WyomingKnott]

IMO, putting the paging file on the RAM drive is self-defeating unless you are running a 32-bit system and limited to 3 GB of memory.

It's backing store for your RAM. So if you take away a GB of RAM to make backing store for RAM, all you get is more frequent paging (because you have less memory space).

That said, you go to My Computer, Properties, Advanced tab, click on Settings button in Performance, Advanced tab again. Click on Change tab in virtual memory. Add pagefile on R, then delete pagefile on C. Reboot. This will work if the R drive is created fairly early in the boot sequence, so that it is available when the system opens the pagefile.

Best uses for RAM drive - as you have found, it's a great place for high-activity Temp files. A good place for input or output for transcoding audio or video - the reads and writes are blazing.

 

[VictorLimaMike]

Hi guys, I'm upgrading certain components of our stock HP Pavilion for my wife and was looking into the ramdrive solution. She wants get into photo and video editing and was wondering other than add'l ram, need to consider anything else?

Here's new parts list and the current configuration of the PC I'll be working on.

New Parts:
AMD 965 BE Deneb (buying)
16 GB Kensington Hyper X Blu @13333 (buying)
RamDrive software (buying)
Seasonic 620 80+ Bronze (I own)
GTX 560Ti (I own)

Current Config:
AMD 840T (@2.9 GHz)
8 GB Generic RAM
AMD HD 5670
1.5 TB Caviar Green
Win7 Home Prem. 64-bit

Any input you guys have would be much appreciated!

 

[WyomingKnott]

VLM

You should really start a new thread; tacking on to the end of an old one mucks things up.

To the best of my knowledge, good 64-bit and video editing software will use whatever memory is available to is, and putting scratch space on the RAM drive would actually slow things down. I've read a couple of threads on Photoshop that state that the best boost is to put the scratch directory on your SSD, if you have one. But 16 GB of RAM will beat the heck out of 8 GB of RAM and an 8 GB SSD scratch drive.

So my opinion is - don't RAMdrive when you are using software that can use the memory directly. Here at work I'm on a 32-bit system with 8 GB of memory, so I can use a 4 GB RAM drive for all sorts of things. But if she is using programs that can actually use the 16 GB, don't slow them down by making them think that less is available.

If your specific software has a limit on the amount of memory it can use then RAMdrive scratch space could make sense.