So you got 8 gigs of ram or more? Fun time. RAMdrive time.

You can do this with any amount of ram but i advise you to have atleast 16gb so you can get a 8gb drive out of this and still have 8gigs of ram.


Now unless your doing photoshop of heavy 3D rendering more than 8gigs of ram is pretty much useless unless you know what to do.

Ramdisk....Name says it all. Use your ram as a drive. Now i know what your thinking whats a 8gb drive? Well how about a 12gig? Of if you have 24 gigs of ram how about a 20gig?

So for my test i am using a 4gb disk size with 16gigs of ram "Dual channel" down clocked to 1333mhz. This is pretty much a common set up in terms of ram speed and disk sizes that will be used. We will then compare it to my SSD's in RAID0 and see how it preforms.

Its pretty easy to set up and has some pretty advanced options. I use it on my desktop that has 64 gigs of ram and i have it set up so i have a 52 gig drive that i hold wow on. When i start windows it loads the image and when i quit it saves the image. And i will tell you i have yet to see a load screen in World of Warcraft




In this picture you see the RAID0 SSD set up on the left and a 4gig RAM drive set up on the left with the memoy downclocked to 1333mhz. As you can see it packs quite a punch.


Uses for the small drive sizes? Well you can use it as a cache to help with the SSD wearing, Load your programs if you can provide enough space. But try it out and see if you like or have a use for it. Some people don't know they can do this and and may have a use for something like this.


Edit. Test was done on a laptop nothing optimized old install of windows and just a basic RAMdrive set up.

 

did you just discover ramdrives ? .... just curious

 

hey i didn't know about them until like a year ago lol and i have been using/tinkering with computers for a very very long time. Be nice everyday is a new learning experience especially in computers. I am personally amaz( ed) at how much i ahev learned over the past few years with computers and just even in life lol

I use 8GB and max it out daily with regular operations....i really need 12 GB so annoying. Funny thing is even though Task manager only totals up to like 4GB it says i am using like 7GB...dumb


fixed retard moment

 

sometimes, it is hard to find enough spare room on laptop RAM. its much easier on desktops where getting 32GB is cheap as hell.

 

laptop ram is actually cheaper when you sag a sale. they go as low as 30-35 bucks for 2x4GB even 8GB sticks go for 35-40 bucks when on sale

 

Speaking of learning, perhaps it might have been a good idea if the OP had provide a "What is it?", and "What its good for?" heading before the configuration diagram. Perhaps there is still an opportunity to make this so?

 

It's not so much the pricing that's a problem, it's the limited number of SODIMM slots. Whereas you can stick 8 x 8 GB DIMMs into an X79 desktop mobo, even the X79-based Clevo P270WM only has 4 SODIMM slots.

 

No i was one first people to use it when it came out. But a lot of people dont know about it and with memory as cheap as it is now and how much systems can support i thought i would show some people who dont know about it what its like.

 

some company needs to make a separate box with a connector that goes into PCIe slot that has like 64 slots in it lol. You can build a massive ram drive super cheap now...or build a super massive one

30-40 bucks for 8GB. 8GB*64=512GB would cost ~2grand but hey i am sure someone would do that. That is 4-5 times more than an SSD but would be insanely fast lol. It'll get faster and cheaper when DDR4 becomes main stream. You'll see 16GB sticks...maybe larger

 

PCIe doesn't have enough bandwidth. PCIe 3.0 x16 supplies ~16 GB/s, single channel DDR3-2133 requires 17 GB/s of bandwidth and dual channel requires 34 GB/s.

Besides, there's physical limits to how much RAM a memory controller can address since the electric signal gets weaker the more RAM chips (the little black boxes on a DIMM) you have sharing a channel. This is why servers require expensive high density RAM which uses tricks to either compress or repeat the signal.

Finally, with that much RAM, you'd almost certainly want ECC, which adds to the cost, since data corruption would be an everyday occurrence without it.

 

DDR3 SDRAM - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PCI Express - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

ram that costs around 30 dollars per 8GB is 1333 which has a PEAK bandwidth of 10666⅔MBps

and yes 3.0 is topped at 16GBps so duel channel system would max PCIe 3.0 and if your making a ram drive you use the cheapest ram.....not ram that cost twice as much.

EDIT: can you elaborate on that...referring to the signals. I am sure they can come up with some type of way to make it work. they ahve boxes that suppoert i think 16 slots but the stupid thing is DDR2 and eSATA...pointless

EDIT: also got a link to this "high density ram"?

 

I don't know anything about the box you mentioned so I can't comment on that. In fact, the only modern ramdrive device I'm aware of is Gigabyte's i-RAM, which only supports 4 DIMMs.

Anyways, as with all electronics, RAM has a low level of innate electrical resistance. So if the memory controller sends a 1.5v read or write signal through the channel, if you have 1 chip then that chip will see the full 1.5v, but if you have 8 chips they might only see an average of say 1.4v and if you have 16 they might only see 1.3v. At a certain point the voltage level falls below the margin of error, making the RAM unreachable.

As for high density memory solutions, there's all sorts of ways to do it. For example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_memory (most common)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FB-DIMM (was used in Core 2 era Xeons but fell out of favor in the datacenter because of excessive power consumption and the associated heat generation/cooling needs)

These types of technologies can work in conjunction with stacked RAM (Wikipedia doesn't seem to have an article on this) to enable super high capacity DIMMs. Or, they can simply enable servers that have dozens of memory slots.

[Edit] Incidentally, the type of memory that desktops and laptops use is called unbuffered memory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbuffered_memory. Servers running workloads that are CPU-heavy but memory-light (think Prime95 or calculating the value of pi to a bajillion decimal places) use unbuffered memory as well. While unbuffered memory has very limited scalability, it's also the fastest form of memory as the signaling tricks of the other memory types incur a latency overhead - for DDR3 timings like 7-7-7-20 on anything but unbuffered memory would be pretty much impossible.

 

yea but these chips on on a single dim right? so how would multiply dims affect it? i maybe missing something or not understand but doesn't make sense to me

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.p...sk=view&id=308&Itemid=60&limit=1&limitstart=2
my bad 8 slots...they might have had a larger one that was 16 but i dont know. they still have a site i think.

eSATA for this is stupid lol

 

You were using it in 1980?

Anyhow, it is a good thing for people to know, but it's really not as useful as many might think unless they have a specific need for ultimate transfer speed.

 

Have to agree with HTWingNut,

Especially with Win7x64 Pro or above; giving the O/S all the physical RAM you can is always more beneficial than setting up a RAM drive if your data set is greater than the RAM your system can have installed.

Cons of RAM drives: slow to boot up - slow to shut down - glitchy operation with certain programs - most capable when the usage scenario/data set fits totally inside the RAM drive and very few scenarios fit that 'ideal' mold - sudden power losses could be disastrous (quality UPS highly recommended).

Even using RAM as cache (eboostr and fancycache, for example) gives huge performance boosts for certain (especially benchmarks...) aspects of the system - but even those types of use of RAM would cause system instability and (with fancycache, at least) catastrophic results (needing a full re-install of Windows 7 x64).

If you're using a modern O/S like Win7x64 Pro or above; RAM drives/caches are simply promises to higher performance that usually end up to be no more than gimmicks. Especially with data sets larger than the RAM drives you can create (vs. just using that same amount of RAM for the O/S and software directly) and especially true with SSD powered systems (or; SSD's used solely as temp/scratch disks).

RAM drives are like RAID0 in 2012: fun to see/benchmark/play with but nothing that really gets you actually better performance in most real world/continous usage scenarios.

 

Yeah, I think SSD's have mitigated the need for RAID or RAM disks. SSD's are just so fast with super fast response times. Granted a RAM disk is definitely faster, but the issues tiller mentioned, all data's gone with power, and requiring the time to upload everything you need into the RAM drive makes its use limited.

 

i think RAID 0 for SSDs are valid when you look at the cost of 512GB drives. you cna get two 256GB and RAID 0 them and get better speed and same capacity for 3/4ths the cost. Also with how fast SSDs are you have to RAID 0 your disk drives if you want to transfer anyything to your SSDs in a decent amount of time. RAID 0 of 3TB 7200 rpm drives will give you from 300-400MBps which would be perfect for installing, transferring, and storing data

 

If you rely on your setup day in and day out; RAID0 is not what you should be looking at.

The most impressive part about RAID0 for workstation use is still sequential speeds - but with the current state of all SATA AHCI drivers: even those speeds will drop to below HDD levels sooner rather than later requiring a SE of each SSD and a re-install of the O/S to get back the performance you paid for (probably at least 4-6x per year).

If price vs. capacity is the only reason you're looking at RAID0; then you're missing the point of simply using one drive as the O/S + programs drive and the other drive as the DATA drive. Much more stable setup and all the benefits of keeping your DATA seperate from the O/S (a notable performance increase by itself in certain workflows).

No, RAID0 is simply a way of needing to do regular maintenance to your PC just to keep it running like new - when you really, really don't have to.

 

yea but 256GB doesn't really cost much and doesn't hold a whole lot of games when you count OS and programs...you get like 3-5 games on it tops

 

But if I was a gamer: I would be installing my games to the 'data' SSD too.

 

ha ha i was curious about that too....a ramdrive was something we stuck into the autoexec.bat and/or config.sys files in the DOS days when mechanical drives were really slow.
(I haven't used a RAM drive in a long time.)
(I think some people these days use it as a browser cache, but it may not be good if we want to keep the cookies. Not sure.)
(It may not be big enough for Photoshop use. Some files with many layers will easily go into the 20 or 40 GB scratch-space in no time eventhough the actual PSD file size is small/medium.)

 

true but many PCs can acutally fit 64GB now when DDR4 comes we will have 16GB sticks and up maybe

I think rendering and video editing is more useful in a ram drive than photoshop but i am no expert...just making a judgment form what i know.

 

Video work is largely limited by the CPU, not the I/O. Also, it is almost always sequential, so it even works well with regular hard drives. A ram disk would be handy for something with VERY VERY random access. There are honestly just about zero scenarios in a desktop where a ramdrive will actually benefit, as HTWingNut and tilleroftheearth have pointed out. Let windows manage your ram. It actually does know how to utilize it better than you do 99.99%+ of the time

For example, my laptop has 32GB of ram and I do not use a ramdisk. If I happened to come across a scenario where one may be very useful I could use one, but in general letting the OS manage your ram is best. There are very smart people who write modern OS kernels, and they have made the decisions they did for a reason.

 

i was thinking about videos where your doing like post production stuff to it like effects...i don't know it seemed reasonable lol...i have done virtually zilch with video editing.

 

Yeah, that's the type of stuff I am talking about. Mostly CPU limited and mostly sequential access.

 

ok wrong again..another thing learned hurray a good day!

 

I was going to say that you went over the wall with 32GB or RAM in your laptop, but then I looked in your sig and realized that you have more like shot yourself into space with those specs, LOL.

 

10char

 

Sounds interesting !!

But any idea on the reliability on how long can data be stored on ram without accidental loss ?

 

Only as long as power is fed continously and adequately to the system. (Or until you purposely turn it off).

After that: BAM!!!

No RAM data anymore (till you load the data you want/need to the RAM again).

 

thats why you use UPSs...no biggy. Also back it up every day or 3-12 hours if your super paranoid. Backing up data is real fast when it is sequential. Back up walk away to go pee and come back and it has been done since you probably got to the bathroom lol

 

oooooh.

eh. isn't a ramdrive for temporary/disposable data only?

 

depends on whatever you want to do...you could leave it there forever....at your own risk of a system crash but you can do anything with it...just many things are not advised

 

Once system is turned off or rebooted, all data is erased.

 

No, not anything:

For example; if you set your browser cache/download location to a RAM drive (let's say 2GB capacity) and you try to download anything bigger than that - will simply crash (and you will never get that big download unless you remember to save to another location with enough capacity).

As mentioned before: gimmicky and glitchy (vs. a 'normal' Win7 install).

 

ok again everyone knows that you can't squeeze 10GB of data into a 2GB drive...seriously do i need to break everything down as if everyone on here can't use some common sense? If people are on this forum they are already smarter than the average person so I am sure they can do basic math and understand what a hardrive is and how much space it holds.

EDIT:
as i hope all of us know ram drive=ram hardrive=another hardrive with another set of space.

it is like saying to someone if you get an SSD with 128GB you can't fit more than 128GB...not trying to be a jerk just feel like you treat people are so dumb that they can't deduce anything on their own

 

sure we can... . They invented Doublespace in MSDOS 6 so that we can put almost twice the amount of stuff in a 20 or 40 MB or 63 MB RLL harddrive right before IDE started. Just kidding ok...
(the filename shows up in blue color in Win7 when it's compressed. hmmm... not sure if we can compress a ramdrive... )

 

Only reason i started using ram for storage was when i had my Minecraft server hosted on a 5400rpm hdd.
Now that i bought a Vertex+ (not sandforce) 128gb for cheap its not needed anymore.


Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

 

that is not true at all. only 8-dimm x79 systems maxed on 8GB sticks can reach 64GB. unless we have 16GB dimms for retail now? :S

those systems are not common AT ALL. I believe someone said its strictly not possible on laptops.

EDIT: personally, if you want a ramdrive, I think on a desktop is the only way to go. laptops are just wayyy too fragile.

 

My EON17-S has 32gigs of ram


8 dimm X79 systems are more common then you think. Out of the 38 current motherboards 20 of them are 8 dimm. My MSI Big Bang-XPower II supports 128gb of ram i'll be using it in a system soon when i finish getting parts and i hope 128gb kits of ram come out some time soon.


But for laptops you can use ramdisk like a normal hdd with very little risk. You have a battery so data loss from losing power is pretty low. You can save a image when you shut down automatically and then load the image on boot.

 

Newegg.com - Computer Hardware, Motherboards, Intel Motherboards, 8×240pin, 12×240pin

i sure see a lot of those MOBOs for desktops....not even every expensive

 

< looks at rendering unit > sees 32 DIMM slots
TYAN - Server Motherboards : S8812 (S8812WGM3NR), AMD 45nm 8-Core/12-Core Opteron 6100 Series Processors (Magny-Cours) / HT3.0 support ; 12MB L3 per socket / AMD 32nm 8-Core/12-Core/16-Core Opteron 6200 Series Processors (Interlagos), G34

looks at my 8740w, 8760w and 8770w ... yup 32 GB and they RAMDRIVE nicely ( I sandbox apps on a ramdrive, and run my dosbox stuff there )

ahhh yes the days of autoexec.bat and config.sys editing are coming back. but no offense guys but emm386 in a config was more fun to open up the base 640K for mouse drivers and soundblaster drivers than doublespace.exe or himem.sys or ramdrive.sys/exe ......... thanks for memory lane

and yes 16GB DIMMS for desktops are around
http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT204872BB1067Q

 

i think he meant 64GB on a laptop was not possible...which is obvious.

 

I have an X79 system!

 

I tried putting lol on 3gb of ramdisk and its too little space and is it true that the ramdisk can increase the system boot time?

 

No, not treating anyone like they're dumb - we're just sharing information here.

And, common sense is not so common. Sometimes we do need to see something spelled out to really 'grok' it. (Yeah, even me).



What I would like to see (for everyone's benefit) are concrete examples of where RAM drives help overall (even with the negatives associated with them).

Where I have seen RAM drives help me are:

Editing a single (smaller, 200MB) image and applying/undoing/re-applying multiple filters to it to see which works best. With this specific scenario, I did see performance increase by 10x or more.


Unfortunately, I don't only edit small single images (one at a time) in my workflow...


Here is where RAM drives don't help me (even with 32GB+ of RAM available...):

LightRoom
Nikon Capture NX
AutoCAD
Premiere Pro
PS CS5.5
Web browsing/downloading


There are more examples, but I think this gives a good idea of how in my workflow, RAM drives hinder my systems performance rather than enhances it, most of the time.

(In every single instance, running any combination of RAM drive capacity vs. just simply using the full amount for the O/S and the programs results in a huge Slow Down of productivity (or worse; system crash) - even with systems that are running 100% with SSD storage subsystems (4x SSD's 1) O/S + Programs, 2) DATA, 3) Scratch Disk, 4) Temp Disk)).


Does anyone have any other specific uses where the RAM drive helps by an order of magnitude or more, on a consistent day in, day out basis?

 

In audio processing in AVID MC, like you said filter flopping in small images and for mucking with DOS games

 

@intel 4004 what do you mean? Your hardrives have to transfer all data to Ramdisk at boot up so it should add time to boot up.

 

looking at the 640kb RAM days I had managed it pretty good to have over 600kb free RAM (with 1MB total RAM) Back then I did use ram drive in the extended memory but not that often. And sure some lucky people had soundblasters, lol, nice.

nowadays I see no use for ram drives, unless you're running a unique software that needs to update small records many times per second. Yet even in that case a SLC SSD would probably be perfect.

 

a large percentage of x79 systems may be 8-dimm....but there are exceptionally few x79 systems in use.