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    Booting from ram? lol (or other uses)

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by Tsun, Mar 22, 2012.

  1. Tsun

    Tsun Notebook Consultant

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    So since ram prices have gone crashing down in the recent years, I've noticed that the 32gb ram option is available in somewhat reasonable prices. However, there's a very niche area for any benefit above 16bg or even 8gb, so I was wondering if it's possible to get 32gb ram but only use 16 of it for actual ram usage.

    AKA, is there any way to use part of your ram for something else, now that it's relatively easy to buy "too much" of it?

    Anything other than virtual machines, because I don't see why would I want to run one.
     
    Tsun, Mar 22, 2012
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  2. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Notebook Virtuoso

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    Sure. You can format that RAM as NTFS and store files on it such as your browsers profile data.
     
    Hungry Man, Mar 22, 2012
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  3. jclausius

    jclausius Notebook Virtuoso

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    You should take a look at a RAM disk. It is a piece of software which will take a chunk of memory and let you use it as a volatile disk drive. Unfortunately, you cannot use it to boot (as you suggest in the title) as memory does not typically retain data (unless powered by a battery or other power source) and also the disk does not physically exist until after the OS loads/creates the drive after it has started the boot process.

    However, to do what you suggest is possible, but this wouldn't work in a laptop. Some manufacturers use the memory to create a more permanent storage using something like battery or flash drive backed up RAM disk

    HTH
     
    jclausius, Mar 22, 2012
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  4. funky monk

    funky monk Notebook Deity

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    When you boot a computer from sleep, it's essentially booting from RAM. Technically it's a little different since not actually restarting the operating system, but it more or less equates to the same thing.
     
    funky monk, Mar 22, 2012
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  5. jclausius

    jclausius Notebook Virtuoso

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    TBH, I always thought it was "waking from sleep mode" not booting. Regardless, a true boot either warm/cold will be a restart in which the RAM is cleared.
     
    jclausius, Mar 22, 2012
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  6. Hungry Man

    Hungry Man Notebook Virtuoso

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    I think by booting from RAM he means storing the entire OS onto RAM. This would be cool but not practical. Your kernel is already loaded into RAM along with any other part of your OS that's frequently in use. Storing 1,000 config files that never get read wouldn't help performance much.
     
    Hungry Man, Mar 23, 2012
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  7. jclausius

    jclausius Notebook Virtuoso

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    Yes. I took it to mean the same thing.

    He wanted to know if RAM could be used as an actual drive storing files with a pointer to the MBR within BIOS, the whole works. Something like that is not possible due to hardware limitations, but just using RAM as a physical drive would have to come from something like the Acard RAM drive (2nd para in my 1st post to this thread).
     
    jclausius, Mar 23, 2012
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  8. whitrzac

    whitrzac The orange end is cold...

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    whitrzac, Mar 23, 2012
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  9. kent1146

    kent1146 Notebook Prophet

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    As many people have mentioned, the way to use lots of RAM (32GB) would be to assign 8GB to system RAM, and use the other 24GB as a RAMDisk.

    A RAM disk is treated as just another storage device to your computer. So you can use it to store files, install programs, etc. The only drawback is that RAM is volatile, which means that it loses whatever data is in it once you power down. There are some RAM disk utilities that will automatically save / reload the contents of your RAM disk to non-volatile storage (e.g. hard drive) so that the data remains even after you power down.

    However, I must say that it isn't worth it at all to buy additional RAM, just for purposes of creating a RAM disk. It's fine to do if you already have the RAM, and will use that RAM for other things (large databases, virtual machines, photo / video editing). But it is not worth buying RAM just for purposes of creating a RAM disk. You'd spend at least $200 on 32GB of RAM. And at that point, you might as well get a 120GB or 240GB SSD instead.
     
    kent1146, Mar 23, 2012
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