How about running a RAMDISK in your system pagefile?

[rodewouw_]

(Greetings from Belgium)

 

Tech support:

What the title says...

 

I've recently had to expand my storage. I added in a 1TB WD Barracuda (Came from an old iMac, am using at my own risk. I know) and had an old 128 M.2 SATA SSD lying around.
Since I have Zero budget left, I thought that maybe it'd be possible to use the SSD as a caching drive just like Intel Optane or AMD StoreMi, however StoreMi (Using an AMD system) didn't want to install and had not the most encouraging reviews.

After some reserach I found an 'alternative' but that uses RAMdisks, not what I want. I barely have enough with 16GB.

Right now I do not use the SSD and have simply set 120GB of page file on that SSD lmao

So... what if I set the RAMdisk to that pagefile? Wouldn't that work? It's an SSD so it's still faster than the HDD. Why wouldn't it work?

Before attempting this I have tried researching a bit, but the only results I found were "Pagefile in ramdisk", the opposite of what I was looking for.

 

Is there anyone savy enough about this topic to help me out? I do not feel like finding out the hard way myself (Like I did with 2nd hand PSUs :)))))

 

I did not want to use storage spaces, since it limits storage to 256GB (128GB from the SSD + 128 from the HDD) for some reason. I want the full 1TB to be used.

 

Additional info:

Windows 11, latest

Ryzen 9 5950X non OC + NH-U12A

16GB PC4 3200MT/s

GTX 780 3G

Aorus B550 Elite v2 (rev1.2)

-> CPU and MOBO appear compatible with storeMI, but does not work

 

Thanks in advance.

rode

 

PS: Might be a stupid question and the answer might've been there all along, but let this be the answer to those lost with the same question as I have.

[mariushm]

There's no such thing as a WD Barracuda - Barracuda is a Seagate keyword as far as I know

 

ImDisk can do ram drives backed to a physical drive : https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/ - but won't help for what you're trying to do.

 

Pagefile is mostly used when a program needs ram and your ram is used by other programs - whatever inactive programs or less often used programs you have, Windows takes some chunks of memory used by those programs and dumps it to pagefile, and the ram freed is given to the new application.

If you don't have programs that need ram, the empty space in ram is used to cache often used stuff, preload files (ex if you start listening to a music file, WIndows may load all the file in ram so that when player tries to read next 512 KB - 1 MB of the file, the operating system will give it from ram instead of reading from disk)

 

If you want to have a ssd backed ramdisk, you can, but you'd have to limit the pagefile to some size, so that the remaining size can be "reserved" for ImDisk.

Then, you basically have a ssd backed ram drive, but you still need to have some software or something to do the actual tracking of files that are accessed often, caching stuff etc.

 

My 2 cents... it's not worth the effort. Don't bother.

[rodewouw_]

Hey, thanks for the reply. I forgot to mention that I have a main pagefile (20GB on my main OS drive) and that that other pagefile is just for funzies in the meantime.

I also meant seagate barracuda, got confounded because all my other drives ar seagate drives.

 

Thinking back, doesn't unraid (or probably any other NAS-esque OS / manager) support SSD caching of HDDs?

There has to be a way to do this on a desktop, right?

Having a ramdisk use up more ram is not worth it for me and I cannot afford a high capacity SSD for I have spent all my money on a 5950X

[Electronics Wizardy]

Running a ramdisk on a pagefile seems like getting SSD speeds with extra steps. You can set ramdisks in linux atleast to to go pagefile/swap if ram is low, but this generally doesn't make sense as its just ssd speeds.

 

If you want to play with caching, You can use the storemi for just that drive, and it should be fine. Otherwise you can use storage spaces tiering, but then its a have fun with powershell type of thing.

 

7 minutes ago, rodewouw_ said:

Thinking back, doesn't unraid (or probably any other NAS-esque OS / manager) support SSD caching of HDDs?

 

Yup, but unraid is write only caching. Storage spaces in windows supports this, but you need powershell to set it up.

 

28 minutes ago, rodewouw_ said:

After some reserach I found an 'alternative'

What alternative did you find? TYpically you don't use a ram disk for caching a HDD with a SSD>

[rodewouw_]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Running a ramdisk on a pagefile seems like getting SSD speeds with extra steps. You can set ramdisks in linux atleast to to go pagefile/swap if ram is low, but this generally doesn't make sense as its just ssd speeds.

 

If you want to play with caching, You can use the storemi for just that drive, and it should be fine. Otherwise you can use storage spaces tiering, but then its a have fun with powershell type of thing.

 

Yup, but unraid is write only caching. Storage spaces in windows supports this, but you need powershell to set it up.

 

What alternative did you find? TYpically you don't use a ram disk for caching a HDD with a SSD>

StoreMI decided to give up and didn't want to install (Retried twice)

 

The 'alternative' I mentioned was in quotations because it's software that creates ramdisks, what I don't want. (was it called primo cache or something? paid so no interest haha)

 

Maybe storage spaces might be an option?

Will look a bit better into it in the morning.

If anyone knows how that works, please let me know?

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, rodewouw_ said:

The 'alternative' I mentioned was in quotations because it's software that creates ramdisks, what I don't want. (was it called primo cache or something? paid so no interest haha)

 

Primocache can cache a drive with RAM or disk. It doesn't really "create ramdisks' at all.

 

2 hours ago, rodewouw_ said:

Maybe storage spaces might be an option?

Will look a bit better into it in the morning.

If anyone knows how that works, please let me know?

There should be some guides out there for storage spaces. Set the SSD to the fast tier, and HDD to slow tier.