RAMdisk as Cache

[mully006]

I recently learned about RAM disks where you can partition a portion of your ram into a writable drive.  I know that it has very very fast write and read times and that it temporary so it is deleted every time the computer shuts down.  I was thinking that a great application for this would be to set it up as cache for a hard drive or an ssd.  Has anyone ever done this? Will there be significant performance benefits?  I am unfamiliar with  RAMdisks and caching so any info would be appreciated.  Also note that this is a theoretical question and I know that the cost of 64gigs of ram is on the same order as 1T ssd's.  Just a though problem.... for now.

 

Thanks

 

-James

[ShadyHost]

I recently learned about RAM disks where you can partition a portion of your ram into a writable drive.  I know that it has very very fast write and read times and that it temporary so it is deleted every time the computer shuts down.  I was thinking that a great application for this would be to set it up as cache for a hard drive or an ssd.  Has anyone ever done this? Will there be significant performance benefits?  I am unfamiliar with  RAMdisks and caching so any info would be appreciated.  Also note that this is a theoretical question and I know that the cost of 64gigs of ram is on the same order as 1T ssd's.  Just a though problem.... for now.

 

Thanks

 

-James

 

Most RAMdisk programs allow you to save the contents of your ram disk to an image file. This makes the shutdown time super long but if you have something on it that you use every day it is worth it.

 

So theoretically you could tell Origin to install Battlefield 4 on a Ramdisk and it would load from there. Assuming you have enough space for the 24gb or something like that.

[mully006]

Most RAMdisk programs allow you to save the contents of your ram disk to an image file. This makes the shutdown time super long but if you have something on it that you use every day it is worth it.

 

So theoretically you could tell Origin to install Battlefield 4 on a Ramdisk and it would load from there. Assuming you have enough space for the 24gb or something like that.

 

I know this. Personally I think that its not worth it.  I'm concerned with the idea of using it as cache to speed up all data transfers to a storage drive.  

[helping]

Caching programs take a while to learn what to cache, unless you can specify files and folders or don't plan on shutting off anytime soon, it's not worth it just for a cache. Use it for scratch/temp storage instead.

[Vitalius]

I never shut down my PC. Just put it to sleep. 

I have 32GB of RAM and this is why I advocate more RAM (16GB in the form of 2x8GB). You can use it for more than just the normal RAM stuff. It's expensive now, but when I mostly advocated it, it was less expensive.

[fizzlesticks]

 

 

So theoretically you could tell Origin to install Battlefield 4 on a Ramdisk and it would load from there. Assuming you have enough space for the 24gb or something like that.

Unfortunately I tried this using Windows 7 and 32GB of RAM and it isn't enough for the entire thing. With a few of the data files linked to a harddrive it made a noticeable improvement but it's not worth it.

[sotiris.bos]

I just use my 1GB RAMDisk for chrome browser cache and windows temporary files to avoid some writes on my SSD. It is a tiny bit faster and more responsive than the SSD when firing up chrome and while browsing, but my boot time has slightly increased (by about 2-4 seconds), still blinding fast though. It just isn't convenient for large amounts of data and the price to performance ratio is really bad compared to an SSD. Also caching data located on an SSD just seems useless in my opinion.

[IdeaStormer]

Most RAMdisk programs allow you to save the contents of your ram disk to an image file. This makes the shutdown time super long but if you have something on it that you use every day it is worth it.

 

So theoretically you could tell Origin to install Battlefield 4 on a Ramdisk and it would load from there. Assuming you have enough space for the 24gb or something like that.

 

No, they save to it from time to time and when idle, then when you shut down they only try to sync what has not already been saved to the image file. If it had to copy everything every time it would make it pointless.