What to do with a RAMdisk

[Mooshi]

So I created a RAMdisk on a whim and benched it and wow..it makes my SSD look so slow by contrast.

 

Since this freeware version only lets me create a RAMdisk up to 4GB, what can I do with this to take advantage of the speeds?

 

[Excon]

I had a 16Gb RAMdisk. All I did with it was brag about the speed's, I see no point in them to be honest. Also you have considerably lower speeds than I did.

[CoolBeans]

Use it as a cache

[mvitkun]

You could record uncompressed video to it,though 4GB isn't enough.

You could install a game on it,though 4GB these days isn't enough.

You could render video to it,though there will most likely be very little benefit.

You could cache commonly used files,though it's unlikely that you'll notice any difference from your SSD.

You could change the cache location for your browser tot he RamDisk,though there'll be little difference and you'll have to save to RamdisK before shutting down,and wait for it to load while booting up.

 

So basically you can't really do anything.

[Excon]

8x 32Gb DDR4 dimms, you could make a 240Gb ramdisk for all your OS and programs/games that backup to an SSD regularly and still have 16Gb of ram for the system to use. Next to nothing loading times ftw!

Let me know when when the cost of that drops to the sub billionaire level?

[Mooshi]

I thought of something. Seagate has a hybrid solution that uses a small SSD to cache..most high end HDDs have 64mb of cache. I wonder if there is a way to take a standard hard drive and make it use 4GB worth of RAMdisk to function like the Seagate XT...except better in every possible way.

[Flojer0]

Let me know when when the cost of that drops to the sub billionaire level?

Well technically he said Giga-bits (Gb), 32Gb is only 4GB (GigaBytes). 8x4GB dimms would be 32GB, which currently seems to run $310 and up on newegg.

 

Explanation: lowercase 'b' stands for bits and uppercase 'B' stands for Bytes.

[Flojer0]

I thought of something. Seagate has a hybrid solution that uses a small SSD to cache..most high end HDDs have 64mb of cache. I wonder if there is a way to take a standard hard drive and make it use 4GB worth of RAMdisk to function like the Seagate XT...except better in every possible way.

Sorry for the double post but this reminded me. I've tried a caching utility before called primo-cache (http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/index.html). I had a 2GB read/write cache going for a little while but didn't notice much difference and got only like a 5% hit rate. Granted I don't leave my computer on overnight so it may not have been remembering my most commonly used blocks and had to redo the cache each day. Plus windows is suppose to cache at the file level anyway so this is almost as bad as those utilities that give you more ram by moving dormant data to the page file instead of letting your OS do it.

[sysloc]

No one has mentioned virtual machines?

[Mooshi]

I had a 16Gb RAMdisk. All I did with it was brag about the speed's, I see no point in them to be honest. Also you have considerably lower speeds than I did.

I realized it was at 500MB instead of 100MB :T

 

This any better?

 

[Excon]

I realized it was at 500MB instead of 100MB :T

 

This any better?

Not really, I got 10k on my sequential's with 512k slightly behind can't remember anything else.

[Mooshi]

Not really, I got 10k on my sequential's with 512k slightly behind can't remember anything else.

What was your RAM clocked at anyway?

[whatthe_fuzz]

No one has mentioned virtual machines?

How much space would a linux vm take up?

[Excon]

What was your RAM clocked at anyway?

1600Mhz so yours should be higher.

[sysloc]

How much space would a linux vm take up?

Less than 1GB in most cases. Some Linus distros can live and breathe on less than 128MB of space.

[Mooshi]

1600Mhz so yours should be higher.

Weird, maybe it also has to do with latency as well.

 

I overclocked to 2000mhz and got this:

 

 

Not gonna keep the RAMdisk until I have a use for it, but this gives me an excuse to tinker.

[looney]

if you want a bigger ramdisk for free then I would recommend softperfects free ramdisk software:  
 
http://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/
 

Key features of the RAM Disk:

Any number of RAM disks. In practice, up to 26 disks due to the number of drive letters available.
Any RAM disk size on 64-bit systems. Up to approximately 3.5 GB on 32-bit systems.
Persistent RAM disks with an associated on-disk image.
Volatile RAM disks whose content disappears on shutdown.
Built-in disk image manipulation tools.

[looney]

noob question, but why would you need a ramdisk if you got a ssd?

more then 10 times faster then a SSD