Ramdisk, any experiences?

So my new laptop will be here in about a month and it come with 16GB RAM stock (lol overkill?) so I thought to myself: What on earth should I do with all of this RAM? I won`t use more than 4GB RAM max, so I have like 12 GB left.
So I started googling around and I discovered something called Ramdisk. Apparantly it is to use a portion of your entire RAM and make it a storage room, as if it was a SSD or HDD, and you will get a very good speed boost since you can access data there much faster.

Here is a CrystalDiskMark screenshot from a guy who made a 10GB Ramdisk out of 16GB 1600 DDR3 RAM. Vertex 3 can just go home. Totally insane speeds.


So what applications will benefit from this? Are there any downsides?

 

Downsides are that it isn't persistent, you will have to reload whatever you have on there every time you restart or boot up. What ramdisk application are you using? I used to set up a RAM disk to set things like temp cache files and such.

 

Ah, I didn`t think of that. So you have to transfer whatever you will be using the Ramdisk with from the SSD to the RAM every time you boot up since the system clears the RAM after turning it off? Bah, was thinking more of something like Seagate momentus XT where I had one smaller portion of the RAM (SSD) much faster than the rest. Putting on there and forgetting about it. Damn, that limit its usability some. But that speed, I mean, just look at it

I don`t have the new laptop here yet, and I have no idea what ramdisk software is the best. Any suggestions?

 

The only thing I'd think about using a RAMDisk for would be the Windows swap-file. The swapfile can be set to clear prior to reboot anyway, so there's no issue there. You might be able to do it for browser caches too, if you're the type that sets your browser cache to clear on close, but I don't see a benefit there. It's also hard to say if the swap-file would be a benefit either; since you have 16GB of RAM, how much swapping would really be taking place?

RAM always requires a power-on state to hold data, unlike an SSD, which uses flash memory that can hold data even in a power-off state.

 

I will be using the RAM for pagefile too I guess to save space on the SSD plus getting faster acess than I would if I used the SSD.

Are you shure the browsers will go any faster when using the RAM? I thought they couldn`t load any faster.

 

Only when loading pages that are at least partially cached.

As I said, I don't see a huge benefit, unless you have a really slow internet connection.

 

That is pretty impressive.

Now imagine if SSDs used flash that fast.

 

putting the swapfile there is rather ironic. you reduce the ram to increase the chance of swapping to ram, then. not really useful no. and in case of crash (bluescreen), the swapfile is used, too, to be able to trace back error information and inform you later about reasons of bluescreen, and how to fix it (new drivers, or stuff). not possible when on ramdisk.

if the ram is split in 2, or 4 modules, how about spending them to someone less lucky that can use a bit more ram (and the modules fit)?

if you just let them be, the os will fill them with help of superfetch, so you get actually what you thought: a big ram cache for faster disk accesses.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/len...aid0-worlds-fastest-laptop-3.html#post7575831

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...579985-ssd-ram-drive-worth-2.html#post7551526

Above are two of my recent post about ramdrives. I use a ramdisk extensively cuz I have a special purpose app on a Lenovo W700 quadcore and do gobs of I/O every day. Didn't wanna wear out a HD or SSD and I wanted it FAST, so I went with a ramdrive.

Ramdrives are scary fast; blink and you miss it...once you get a taste of a ramdrive, you'll never go back.

 

it's fast... but there still is that some issue of... volatile memory? the point of have a 'drive' is to store data perminately, faster the better, but perminately.

oh and pagefile/swapping on ramdisk is useless... reduce your cache, add a lay of complexity, and use the removed spaces as more cache, is pointless. just turn your pagefile of it you have the much ram.

 

Anybody up for an SRAM drive? It's blows away DDR3 by an order of magnitude

 

I agree it's ironic --but so is 16GB of RAM in a laptop when you're not going to really utilize it.

 

There is one situation where putting the Windows pagefile on the Ramdisk makes a lot of sense. It is when you are running 32-bit Windows 7 or Vista with 4GB of dual channel RAM installed. Windows can only read 3GB in that case, so the Ramdisk essentially gives you a whole gig of RAM for swap and also minimizes disk fragmentation over time.

This is the setup I have on my C2D laptop and it is noticeably faster when I have lots of windows open, and there seems to be less of a performance degrade over time as my HDD fills up.

You might ask, why not just use 64-bit Windows? Some software (like SAS) just aren't too happy in 64-bit and will break.

 

How would the RAMDISK be able to use the extra 1G ? I thought the RAMDISK is still a program running under Windows and it is Windows itself cannot address the area between 3G-4G due to reserved address by video card etc. ?

 

But Windows already does its own caching.
I read somewhere on Microsoft Forums that this was discourage because Windows will try to cache contents on that RAMDisk so you will actually be doing redundant caching.
Windows will not touch pagefile unless you are running out of RAM.

 

64bit, Sir 64bit.

 

I just have the pagefile disabled with 4GB. No reason, really.

I'm considering using a RAMDisk again since I rarely restart the computer. Shutdown times increased drastically when I tried it on my old computer.

 

Not your pagefile on RAMdisk. Pagefile is accessed even if you have plenty of RAM, as a matter of fact some programs require a pagefile regardless of how much memory you have. This is becoming less and less so with newer programming, but I've had programs (games even) crash because of no pagefile, so I at least make one minimum 256MB, and can expand to 2GB. But it never exceeds 256MB.

Temp files like your windows temp directory that can consume a lot of space over time if it's not emptied. Plus things like browser cache, although Firefox can be configured to do this on its own now, maybe Chrome too, don't believe IE can.

 

It definitely can since essentially you're creating a separate drive at boot. Windows 7 can see the 4gb, it just doesn't use it. I also set an option for Windows to purge the pagefile at shutdown so that it doesn't go looking for them on reboot (since the RAM would have cleared the contents anyway). This minimizes the increase in boot time to about the same as without Ramdisk.

The results on a newly formatted system is not very significant. But after 6 months of heavy usage, it's like night and day. The system with the pagefile on Ramdisk still runs like it was freshly installed.

And I have an integrated graphics card.

You can't read can you? If you have a 32 bit system, the Ramdisk gives you an extra gig to operate that you otherwise wouldn't have, so that's one situation where having the Ramdisk is unanimously better. My 32 bit system can commit charge 3900mb of memory on occasions where I have 100 windows and tabs open. On my regular 32bit system without a Ramdisk, I would be paging hard to the harddrive and crawling due to my 4200rpm HDD and slow as molasses 4k read/write speeds.

For 64bit systems, there's no point to use Ramdisk unless you have a fragile SSD that you don't want to wear down. But there's a darn good reason to use a Ramdisk for 32 bit systems if you have 4gb of RAM installed.

 

May be I misunderstood him then, I thought he was talking about 32 bit Windows 7.

 

Windows 7 can see the 4GB, though it is not it doesn't use it but it CANNOT use them. Those address range are reserved for hardware from video card to other PCI devices.

A RAM disk is just a program running under Windows 7 asking some memory so if Windows 7 cannot manage those RAM(beyond 3G under 32 bit OS), I still don't understand how a RAM disk can.

 

It sounds like a great idea to me. How did you designate the spare 1G of ram as a separate drive?

I think a lot of older computers, like my Alienware m9750, can only use 3G of ram with 32bit OS. It would be nice to take advantage of the 1G of fast storage.

 

This is just conjecture, but the program could be using some sort of PAE lock bypass hack.

 

Ah, you mean PAE. That make sense then. Though I am wondering if that specific area between 3G-4G, are they available under PAE ? Beyond 4G, RAM disk supporting PAE does make sense for 32 bit OS in that the page file can now be on RAM making swapping faster.

 

If you remove the hard coded limit, system memory beyond around 3 GB is entirely accessible. This usually requires either replacing Windows system files (if you want the memory to be accessible to the OS and all applications via normal means) or writing a device driver (to access the memory via that specific driver) though.

If you want to try it out, there was a thread here a while back where a guy had patched the OS to disable the limit and was able to access 8 GB of RAM on a 32 bit OS.

 

I know PAE can access beyond 4G which is not an issue as Server 2003 for the enterprise use have been doing that for years. It is those specific area between 3G-4G. Say if the video card use 512M in that area, how can the OS(patched or driver) use the same addressing space without stepping on each other's foot ?

 

hmmm... well I pretty sure I can kinda explain ramdisk... easy really...

you make a program that simply asks the OS 'can I have xxxGB of ram? OS says yes or no. one memory is granted, the program registers that a new disk is assigned and the OS assigns a drive letter.... a d done! simple.


Oh and 32bit OS can use 4G ram, they leave the extra GB as reserved but it's actually being used. However it is true that a single program can use no more than 4G of ram.

 

That addressing space is being used for sure but are the memory in that same space being used at all ?

BTW, I forgot to mention that Windows 7 seems to have disabled the ability of PAE on 32 bit version.

So the question is, is anyone using RAMDISK on Windows 7 32 bit(4GB RAM or more) which doesn't eat into the 3.2G ?

 

It's probably using the address space between 4 and 5 GB and mapping that to your RAM. However, I'm no expert at either PAE or bypassing the software lock on it in client versions of Windows, so this is just a guess.