Ramdisk Cache

[aodix85]

so i have a ramdisk using softperfect, i have 24gb of ram with another 24 on the way will be here soon.  right now i am using only 4gb for the disk but will probably allocate another 4gb total 8gb.  i have TEMP and TMP folders as well as the chrome cache in there, it helps greatly with popcorntime and is surely saving my SSD's limited number of write cycles....question is since i am using it anyways, what other uses can i get out of this with the understanding that the system is volatile so, in other words, what else can i feed through there that likely wont matter to me if i lose it?  i dont want to be installing programs to it and i dont intend to save the disk contents to an image.  any suggestions on speeding this thing up?  general purpose workstation and gaming rig as well as media center mostly used for gaming but occasional autocad ptc creo and similar programs and occasional VM's running different flavors of linux.

[Bananasplit_00]

random .txt notes for stuff that isnt important?

[Naeaes]

I've been wondering about one crazy thing. How about having the bootloader cone the OS from the SSD to the ramdrive on every boot. Then junk the whole thing on every shutdown. It'd keep the OS perfectly clean, immune to viruses and so on. Booting would probably be slower but how friggin' fast would it be to use! 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Well, here's my two cents on the matter...

• Depending on the SSD, you have to write a ton of data to it before you start seeing errors and even more on top of that before the SSD is considered unusable. Unless you're writing terabytes of data to it a day, chances are you'll outgrow the SSD long before it'll die.
• There's no point in installing applications to it or running applications from it because you're not saving any time (you're still doing a storage -> RAM transfer). Besides, Windows is very smart about using up your RAM for caching data for frequently used programs, so if you're launching these apps a lot, they'll just start living in RAM.
• If my experience with using an NVMe SSD for a while now is teaching me something, it's that loading performance doesn't really budge after SATA speeds. But that could be that SSDs have not improved in latency while RAM still much faster latency.

Diverting temp files to it though is something I think is a smart idea.

[Stadin6]

2 hours ago, Naeaes said:

I've been wondering about one crazy thing. How about having the bootloader cone the OS from the SSD to the ramdrive on every boot. Then junk the whole thing on every shutdown. It'd keep the OS perfectly clean, immune to viruses and so on. Booting would probably be slower but how friggin' fast would it be to use! 

you could have the OS be a VM. Have a Linux distro be the VM host and let it stay on forever. Then install a VM with OS of choice on a ramdisk. This allows you to update the VM (improtant if it is windows) without having to shout down the hardware. Every time you want to boot up the VM it should take no time.

[aodix85]

7 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Well, here's my two cents on the matter...

• Depending on the SSD, you have to write a ton of data to it before you start seeing errors and even more on top of that before the SSD is considered unusable. Unless you're writing terabytes of data to it a day, chances are you'll outgrow the SSD long before it'll die.
• There's no point in installing applications to it or running applications from it because you're not saving any time (you're still doing a storage -> RAM transfer). Besides, Windows is very smart about using up your RAM for caching data for frequently used programs, so if you're launching these apps a lot, they'll just start living in RAM.
• If my experience with using an NVMe SSD for a while now is teaching me something, it's that loading performance doesn't really budge after SATA speeds. But that could be that SSDs have not improved in latency while RAM still much faster latency.

Diverting temp files to it though is something I think is a smart idea.

as far as the lifespan of the disks....yea i agree...not really a huge concern but a nice benefit...and yea i dont have the patience to install a program or wait for an image to do it for me on each bootup for any applications and no need for any one particular application to load and run especially quickly, id rather if possible have all of windows be a little bit faster than one program being a lot faster....ive thought about an NVMe PCIe SSD but my HP Z600 is only PCIe 2.0 so id max out at i believe 2000MB/s transfer rate (theoretical, i KNOW) which is slower than many of the drives out there today so the expense i dont think is worth it for me there yet but with that said its kinda nice to know that i wont see a huge benefit from my R0 setup in real time usage atm...i am beginning to wonder if the setup i have now is about as good as it gets in terms of the benefits of a ramdisk 

[aodix85]

8 hours ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

random .txt notes for stuff that isnt important?

yea sure and i will do that here and there, and also the system will do that by using the TEMP and TMP folders but they're pretty small and not utilizing much of the disk.....i thought if i did video or large photo file editing that may be a good place to house them during the modifications only of course, but i rarely do anything like that so perhaps my situation just doesnt really warrant having a big ramdisk

[aodix85]

5 hours ago, Stadin6 said:

you could have the OS be a VM. Have a Linux distro be the VM host and let it stay on forever. Then install a VM with OS of choice on a ramdisk. This allows you to update the VM (improtant if it is windows) without having to shout down the hardware. Every time you want to boot up the VM it should take no time.

thats certainly interesting..the issue i have been having with windows as a host using VM's is the lack of gpu pass thru with virtualbox which really sucks....unraid could work but i need to have windows running and readily accessible so i dont see that as an option unless i install it in another VM but i really dont want to do that, i would much rather have windows be the host...im going to look for other (free) vm wares with pass thru but i am doubtful that i will find much...very neat idea for a use case though