Ramdrive or M.2 Which is faster?

[Sirgeorge]

So, which is faster? I know frequency and type will play a role here but still. What do we have on the breakdown.

[The Sloth]

...ram drive is fast but also non-volatile memory 

[bgibbz]

Ram drive is faster, but not practical. m.2 is already faster than 99.9 percent of people need. 

[JoostinOnline]

Obviously a RAM drive. There isn't any question. It's like asking if a floppy disk or SSD is faster. 

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Sirgeorge said:

So, which is faster? I know frequency and type will play a role here but still. What do we have on the breakdown.

 

[GirlFromYonder]

Ram drive. But it only stores it till the ram stick is powered

[KenjiUmino]

what do you want to store on this drive ? software and games ? a database accessed by multiple users in some kind of server environment ?

[Doramius]

I'm going to agree with RAM drive with a caveat.  

 

RAM drive is faster...as far as the technology and how it is implemented.  If you use software to use the system memory as a drive, it is faster in full function.  It is a pain if you lose power [definitely want your system on a battery backup], and is extremely slow on the shutdown and boot, even if you're backing up to an SSD.  

 

There is the Gigabyte i-RAM, which mainly connects via PCI-E.  It's only about 4GB max storage, and is quite fast.  Even has a built in battery that lasts about 5 days without external power.  Not cheap and small amount of storage.  However, for older systems, the main data goes through a SATA II connector.  Reads and Writes are not much better than a high end SSD.  The Crystal Disk Marks for them are all over the internet.  The old SATA connection is a horrible bottleneck.  Curtis, Inc. has the HyperHD, which has a larger storage capacity version that goes up to 32GB,.....but again connects via SATA II.  :facepalm:

 

Because of the cost, the use of fiber channel versions in enterprise environments is way more feasible.  Curtis, Inc. does have a Fiber Channel RAM disk [HyperXCLR] that is insanely fast.  Still has a battery and limited storage, but can be placed in a RAID and can beat pretty much any drive on the market.  You're talking instant transfers of file sizes as big as Blu-ray files.

 

So is RAM Disk faster....depending on the situation and connection, yes.

[benoit.nadeau]

I know there are RAM module with battery for remanancy, but only for server, this could be useful for permanent RAM drive

 

[AshleyAshes]

51 minutes ago, benoit.nadeau said:

I know there are RAM module with battery for remanancy, but only for server, this could be useful for permanent RAM drive

 

Gigabyte had a consumer version once upon a time:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM

 

By todays standards, 4x1GB of DDR1 on SATA1 probably isn't useful to most people.

[The_Askinator]

Ran Drive, but it's not practical because when you cut power, all data goes bye bye. Intel has SSDS that are very similar to ram drives and are not non volatile, which means, they have the performance of a ramdrive but keep the pros of an ssd.