The new SSD Thread (Benchmarks, Brands, News and Advice)

Amazon should drop soon, a few pages back, I think Newegg had it for $630.

 

You probably wouldn't notice the speed difference but it would put less "wear and tear" on your SSD.

 

If you're not noticing it, you're not doing it right.

 

Hell yeah Boris! I'm waiting for a reasonable RAM-based SSD to hit the market. Until then, I plan to get either 8GB or 16GB of RAM and set aside 4/5GB as a software RAM disk and load game files off of it. Seems to be the ultimate in speed and comparable, if not cheaper, than getting a high end SSD. Volatility isn't a problem because the HDD manages most things fine for me - if I want to load big files, I'd just set aside a reasonable amount and make it a RAM disk. Now just to wait until notebook chipsets can support more than 8 GB of RAM...

 

This is my benchmark for Intel SSD x25-M on an Hp HDX16t

 

You have no clue how much less nice than just an ssd that is.

 

well.

a) if your cashe gets killed each reboot, then you load more from the web, and the web is much much much slower than any hdd, espencially any ssd.

b) if you store / reload your cache each time, it will take a hit in boot time.

c) the bottlenecks are somewhere else. cache is never the bottleneck of your browsing speeds when on an ssd. so having it faster doesn't mean it gets loaded faster from net, nor faster interpreted and rendered to screen.

ramdisks can help in certain cases. but an ssd helps in a much more important case: make your os and apps all snappy by default. no tweaking and fiddling around needed, no "pinning" of certain apps into the ramdisk, etc.

if you want ramdisk performance, just use vista with superfetch, it does preload your data into ram dynamically. no need to manually configure a ramdisk, then.

 

Davepermen, or anyone else, did You ever use Mtron on ICH7-M southbridge, and if yes, did You notice any performance drops because of ICH7-M limitations to SATA-1?

 

no, never tried. i think i'm on ich9? and not mobile. and the other one is pata disk so no sata there as well. but from ultra-dma6 (100MB/s) to ultra-dma5 (80MB/s) is an obvious measurable speed drop. i don't think mtrons have any speed drop as they never reach sata 1 anyways. not sure if they're s-ata2 at all (i think they are, though).

 

they are SATA-2, and it says they support UDMA6.

page 5: http://www.mtron.net/Upload_Data/Spec/ASiC/MOBI/SATA/MSD-SATA3525_rev0.3.pdf

they maybe can reach SATA-1 in burst speed, but I think that I would never need more than SATA-1 because I don't work anything advanced.

BTW: I was very satisfied with Samsung SLC 1st generation, so Mtron will be perfect

 

Gskill Falcon available on newegg.com. I think it is their indilinx drive we've heard rumors of...

 

The supertalent 256 GB version is a lot cheaper.

 

And i just noticed something too... Instead of the new competition bring prices down, it looks like newegg jacked the other indilinx prices up to sell more gskills! what a crock!

 

After months of using an SSD, i thought i heard a hard drive seek grumble again today... it turned out to be my stomach.

 

I wonder how these perform.....

 

Most likely EXACTLY the same a vertex and ultradrives

 

You say that is if I don't know how it works.
A) If it was only about web surfing...
B) I don't have to sit and wait for boot time...nor do I have to do it on each reaboot.
C) Putting the bottlenecks somewhere else is the whole point of an SSD or a RAMdrive.
SSD's do bottleneck with browsing cache, it's just not a big bottleneck, but it's not just about browsers. I use it for my Sandbox. But getting the data into a usable RAM buffer and feeding it quicker to the CPU does make a difference. Not to mention the apps to load, the other caches and scratch disks and other programs.

No one said ramdrive is required or superior to an SSD. I just said it's speed is superior. To each his own. Yes it can help in all cases where the SSD is still a bottleneck and that does happen more often than you admit, you'll 'notice' it palpably in certain cases, and all the while it's never hurt me.

Yeah Vista is not that super at fetching. Great on paper but it's far from a ramdrive.

Strange to see people nit picking at SSD's performance differences, or rationalize tradeoffs like 32GB storage, and yet somehow they want to rationalize away tangible ramdrive benefits.

 

Tony claims that an SLC Vertex completely filled up is faster than an empty MLC Vertex. If that's true, thank God SLC is being kept alive.

 

It should be. There is a lot less to manipulate in a single level cell and a mutli level cell. Why else would the be so much more expensive? (aside from durability)

 

no, there is no bottleneck when cache is on an ssd. there would be, possibly on a 1GB/s internet with lower latency than the s-ata-till-ssd bus. but once that happens, the ssd will be enhanced as well

your system has more time to spend on actual rendering of the html than loading it from disk. this very page, at least it's start page, is 372KB at 47 files. that takes how long exactly to load from a cache if the latency per file is 1millisecond, and you can read 100MB/s ? exactly: 47 milliseconds + 3.72 milliseconds. and that's on a "bad" ssd. the intel is much faster. we're talking about 50 milliseconds max to load that stuff.

how often do you load 20pages a second? if you load more than 20pages a second, your ssd could be a bottleneck. before, other stuff is (mainly you as you don't load/read that fast).

the biggest problems with webcaches was (and isn't anymore that much) that they created thousands of fragmented files, making the disk slow as you couldn't really store non-fragmented data anywhere anymore. but that was ie6 times and got much better since then.



so internet cache makes no sence to move from an ssd to ram. espencially not if you don't store it, then. as then, when you browse each page the first time, it has to load from the net. and then, suddenly latency can go up to seconds, and transfer to kilobytes a second. over 205ms latency is currently notebook review, so even the initial request of only index.html without any pics, css, javascripts etc yet requested takes longer, 4 times longer, than actually loading the full page from cache. and then you haven't even GOT anything


i have a boot time of 20 seconds, and after another 10 seconds all the 20apps or so are started when in the autorun. that including ableton live, traktor 3, photoshop, media center, all sort of office apps, visual studio. i don't have games right now to test.

but in hankaaron57s case with the ram for the game, it would take longer to boot (as it's a hdd still), and then while booting, it would have to copy over say a 5gb image-of-the-ram-disk-with-the-installed-game to ram. on an ordinary hdd (100MB/s, say), this would take 50 seconds to load. so boot time would be 1 minute longer, and even if this happens during login, it would make booting of other apps slower as it would fully load from disk to ram at the same time. about a minute where the system is not-yet-started, or slowed down to crawl. and that for afterwards starting a game a bit faster? giving up 1min boot time, not gaining any boot time at all.

an ssd is a simple one fits all solution that beats in most cases any specific-situation solution. but it costs money, of course. still, it's worth every cent, as it gives comfort like nothing else.

in hankaaron57s case, hibernate would be useless, as you'd have say 10gb ram to store on a 100MB/s disk (at best times). that'll mean close to two minutes to hibernate, and from hibernation.

if you'd instead get an actual ssd with 250MB/s read, and 200MB/s write, and remove those 6gb for the ramdisk, you can talk about 8seconds till back from hibernation, 10 seconds till in hibernation.

suddenly, tons of usability gains pop up.

 

I can't even read beyond that line, you are too busy trying to justify being right. It's fundamentally inaccurate. You must define bottleneck differently, there is always a bottleneck somewhere and SSD's still have them. .1 ms seek time is a huge latency bottleneck, there will be plenty of wasted cycles and unsaturated bus still waiting for the SSD to pump data faster.
If you tell me you don't palpably notice it with web pages then that would be accurate because it's your subjective experience.

As for me, I know for what and why I do it.

 

Intel 80GB at Newegg was down to $294.99 for about an hour (5:32pm-6:32pm CST).. now backed up to $324.99 so they may have it lower in the future..

 

http://www.engadget.com/2009/04/28/intel-further-slashes-ssd-prices-ups-production-of-1-8-inch-dri/

More price slashing

edit: nope, just me getting tired.

 

Sounds like they may put up that "$30 instant rebate" they had back when it was priced at $392...

Regarding the further price slashing, it's the same price cut, they're just late on reporting it...

 

then READ THE REST I'VE WROTE.

simple definition of bottleneck: the thing that makes your app/task go slow.

nothing is a bottleneck as long as something else is slower.

i develop applications, it's very simple to learn what bottlenecks are, then: the thing that blocks the app from being faster.

with an ssd, the internet cache is never in any form bottlenecking your browsing experience. you gain 0 visible and closeto0 measurable gain on going to a ram-cache. AND you may lose visibly instead at the load-time of the ramdisk, or at the first-refilling of the cache from the net.

just read what i say and understand my points. then, you can disagree. if you don't do that, never state anything about how good your solution is, again.

 

btw, if my computations are right, loading the startpage from disk (the numbers in my post above (start page, is 372KB at 47 files)), then the intel disk has

5.27234375 milliseconds

to load it from disk. so you can load 189.66.. notebookreviewpages per second. or, again, the disk is NOT the bottleneck. i want to see any browser being able to actually render at that speed. that's 200fps a second for a fullscreen interpreted and generated image on the cpu, with only one of the available cores. unlikely.

loading the same from the hdd i'm currently on:

(18milliseconds latency, 30MB/s max read speed)

file-access latency: 846ms actual reading: 12.11ms. so we're talking about nearly a second here, compared to 5/1000s of a second.

now while ram can boost that, not really by much at all, no. and the difference from close-to-a-second to nearly nothing is huge, reducing a bottleneck. but from nearly-nothing to even-more-nearly-nothing is no reduction at all

 

People want to get a ramdisk to put their Firefox cache on it? For serious?

LOL

Ah man.

Take a step back for a minute....

"I want to put in a ramdisk along with my 22 X25 raid cluster so that my hibernate times will go down from 8.20 nanoseconds to 8.19 nanoseconds."

Think we might be overdoing it just a tad fellas.

You guys are fun.

 

that's what i try to state. hankaaron gets to believe that ramdisks are the holy grail for everything. but doesn't understand that it a) isn't the thing that speeds up everything, and b) the fact that it's volatile leads to bigger losses at other places, reducing or even overtaking the gain into a loss.

a fast ssd gives you much more gain than a special configured ramdisk to do some placebo effects.

but of course, there _are_ places for a ramdisk. internet temp cache is not one of those places. big installed software is not one of those places. some very-fast-volatile-database is great for it. for having some tempfile on it for some conversion tool to process, it's great.

what i loved the most is the one who thought about moving the pagefile to a ramdisk so it's faster, then..

intel stated they produce more x18 160gb ssd's now. can't wait to find one available somewhere me wants one soooo badly. all storage problems solved for ever (still have enough space on the 128gb of my main pc, so 160 on the notebook will be much more than enough), and huge speed gain over the samsung.

btw, the samsung 220MB/s (64gb in the 1.8" case) doesn't really cut it, eighter. both the 220MB/s samsung and the 100MB/s samsung (both MLC) are quite a bit less snappy than even the old ide mtron disk.

so i hope for the intel to kick mtrons a** finally. one into the notebook, 1.8", one into the pc, 2.5". and one 80gb into the media-center, then.. can't wait

 

I'm poor plz send money$$$

 

what for?

 

Need more ssd's I wanna be like you

 

If you don't need to retain the cache then why don't just disable disk cache altogether and use only memory cache... No need for ramdisk...

type about:config in the url bar
then type cache in the Filter box
change browser.cache.disk.enable to false
make sure browser.cache.memory.enable is true
add browser.cache.memory.capacity if you want to change allocated RAM amount (in KB)

Finally, type about:cache in url bar to see currently allocated cache amount
IMO, I don't see the point to do this unless you use Jmicron based drive...

 

So, what/when is the next big thing? We have had so many drives coming out one after the other for the past year. This feels like a pause in the SSD evolution

 

this IS the next big thing right now: we have finally good products from all major vendors. now, we can just buy blindly and have fun

the next bigger thing would be more of those pcie based devices beating the sata spec. even the sata6gb spec. just so that it it's useless and outdated before release to get them moving on.

and price drops. next smaller manufacturer process will allow bigger ssd's / lower prices. possibly even more bits per cell resulting in even bigger ssd's / lower prices.

i guess that's about all there is to wait for.

till memristors..

 

I really want my Intel X18M 160GB!

 

I'll definitely take that under advisement.
Now you want to dictate what I say.

Actually, I could care less if others enjoy the benefits of a ramdisk or not, nor do I have any desire to debate it's merits with people that want to play mental gymnastics to massage their ego. It has nothing to do with a browser cache for me, I don't need a 4GB ramdrive for browser cache LOL.

You tried to tell me before I don't need beyond 128GB for an SSD, and for some strange reason wanted me to prove that I required more storage. Now you are trying to convince me why I don't need a ramdisk. I realize it's because you rationalized and justified these things for yourself and you think everyone in the world should think like you but it's not your world. You want to address technical facts yet can't get your head the basic premise that bottlenecks shift during and under varying workloads, applications and usage.
I can see when people want to argue to win rather than really discuss the merits, that is your motivation.

Enough derailing the topic.

 

Another example of you not seeing through your own ego.
I mentioned moving a pagefile to a ramdrive, but never for better system performance. I was amazed how that some people actually made that correlation though, like you.

I've been trying to run without a pagefile since Win98, and most of the time I do until an applications literally requires it.
Just last week I installed a new game that popped up a message requiring a 700MB pagefile. As I stated before and will again, so you might be able to get it this time, there are times that disk pages are hardcoded in apps still.

Well guess what Einstein, if the application is going to be hardcoded to use a pagefile even though there is 8GB addressable RAM then it's a flawed app and it will use a pagefile. So of course I will put a pagefile on my large ramdrive for those reasons, and don't try and convince me it will perform better on disk.

Nice to meet another person who thinks they have all the answers, it's always refreshing.

I'm done now, get the last words in so you can feel you've won.

 

well guess what, einstein: a page file nowadays NEVER hurts system performance except when needed. and at that point, you better have one. having none at that case would mean app crashes.

i only want to get your ramdisks are so great statements under control. people like hankaroon (sorry, i can't remember the spelling) learn wrongly from your statements (read what he posted!!). and you don't even tell they're wrong.

and it's not about winning. never was.

and yes, you're right about stupid apps like photoshop 32bit that always wants to write to disk even if enough ram would be available. thankfully, such apps are rare. for those, a pagefile helps. yes. but that's one of the VERY rare cases i know where they do help.

and no you haven't stated that case above actually. you talked how a ramdisk is more fast than a ssd in general and thus removing bottlenecks. bottlenecks that just aren't there. thus a ramdisk is useless. except in some apps where it might help. like you stated.

and it's still true that in normal circumstances, you don't need ever more than a 128gb ssd. it's not like movies care about where they're stored. and they're about the only big thing on systems nowadays. and if you state games, we have a game-lan-center around here, and we're at 150gb now, with tons of games. removing some of them that don't get played anymore, and 128gb would still fit. the only real usecase for highperforming ssd's > 128gb are f.e. people with a huge vmware farm on their system, for providing support, or developing, or what ever. you always want an ssd if you have a vmware.

but if you control yourself a little, no, you don't need huge ssd's. it's not like you play 10-15games at the same time and daily, or weekly. it's not like you watch all your movies all the time. get that stuff onto an external disk (best, on a network, so you don't even have to physically do anything to watch them).

as said, it's not about winning. it's about thinking, AND it's about caring what you state in here that newbies could understand wrong. ramdisks got hiped quite some times in here for being a holy grail that beats ssd's. that's true for REAL ramdisks. but you can't fit them into a notebook. software ramdisks have limited, special uses, and people have to think about it when using them, as they have other limits and overheads that they might forget. hankaaron did forget tons of those limits and believed in you. don't make that happen again.

educate people right, please. i try to, too. it's difficult i know. bashing is more fun, attacking is, too

 

I happen to agree with davepermen on the general topic. Is a ramdisk faster than an SSD? Of course. But it doesn't necessarily follow that storing content on the ramdisk will improve performance or eliminate bottlenecks. It just isn't that simple; there are other variables that must be considered.

And on the specific point of placing browser cache onto a ramdisk.... I tested that a few months ago while experimenting with my first SSD. Starting Firefox and waiting for it to reload 5 windows with a total of 60-70 tabs and... no noticeable difference between the SSD or ramdisk. There may have been a very small difference when actively loading new pages and the browser writing them to the cache, but not enough to be a concern. And that was with a crappy JMicron-based drive.

I've even done so tests with compiling a large software application with tens of thousand of source files and millions of lines of code. Again, difference was minimal. This was comparing a ramdisk to a Raptor hard drive, so the difference between an SSD and the hard drive would be even smaller. This is another example that faster I/O doesn't necessarily translate to faster performance.

 

For SSDs one benefit of a RAM disk would be that you could put the browser cache there (which reduces disk access/increases the life expectancy of the SSD and speeds up surfing).
Another benefit of a RAM disk is on 32bit OSs with 4GB or more RAM.

So: MadBoris is not totally wrong.

 

You appear to have not read the previous posts regarding ramdisk usage. davepermen's point is that putting the browser cache on a ramdisk doesn't speed up surfing by any meaningful amount. My limited testing with this suggests that he is correct.

But you are correct that a ramdisk can allow you to use memory over 4GB when used with a 32-bit operating system. Of course this is only beneficial if the ramdisk is used for something where it will actually provide a speed boost -- and now we're right back to the argument re: placing your browser cache onto a ramdisk.

 

Not to jump in the middle of a flame war, but my personal experience with ramdisks and xp/jmicron ssd:
I found about 4 apps that stutter the system
page file
browser cache
antivirus updates
photoshop scratch file

I moved the page file and browser cache to the ramdisk (i also beta tested the theory on my desktop). It definitely helped with stuttering from the writes as the browser cache is written. I found all the ramdisk software i tried to be far to buggy and touchy to be useful. I ended up just using the first 10gb on my mechanical disk for everything but the AV updates since obviously you can't really move them unless you just install the program on a different drive. If I was stuck with only one disk I'd probably still use a ramdisk, or get a better disk. I ultimately ended up using steadystate in conjunction with the small swap partition on the mechanical drive. Everything is great about this setup except the reboot every time you start up to commit the changes to the SSD. I'd rather it committed the changes on shutdown and just took its time sitting in my laptop bag or whatever, when I turn on the PC I want to be able to use it quickly. The pagefile could probably reside on a ramdisk, but if you only have 4gb i found that you can pretty easily run out of paging space and start getting low virtual memory errors from crappy code that doesn't close out enough memory when its done. It was especially pronounced on my desktop since it's fast enough to do a crapload of things at the same time if I left it running for a couple hours and did a lot with it eventually it would not release memory from various things and run into the low virtual memory errors or have problems when the browser cache filled the disk and couldn't be written anymore, outlook attachments and such are all written to the same swap space that IE uses so if it fills you can't open attachments etc.

 

I really don't understand how many more times you will say I'm an idiot in ten different indirect ways, Dave. Exactly how is my goal of using a RAMdisk to run my 4 GB game files flawed? No doubt startup and shutdown will be longer - I can live with that. When I start my workstation up, I leave it running for quite a while. Do an online routine/web browsing, so copying files over to it while I check mail and NBR isn't a big deal. I don't need to copy it back to disk afterwards since the files are already saved to harddisk - I will turn off/delete the RAMdisk then.

I simply stated my goal was to try running a game purely on RAM [this is primary storage] and see how quick it would run. I think SSD's are great and fantastic for the developing consumer. But then again you have to remember, I have an XPS laptop that was roughly $4500 new. I'm not here to debate negligible speed differences I may or may not notice. I'm about pushing things to HIGH speeds, because that's how I like to spend my time. Consider it silly, stupid, impractical, whatever - I'm an enthusiast on a computer forum - go figure.

I see videos of computers loading 25 HD videos at once without lag or stutters of Quicktime starting up. DO I need that? No. Would I like to try it? Sure. Maybe not that specifically, but I do do a lot when I turn my computer on, and if I could load some movie trailers from apple.com/downloads while I'm opening old movie footage I shot three summers ago on my external and compress the sound files and splice things, I'd like to try. It's about changing the computing experience. I can't change it if I resort to the old way things are done. That's why I'm trying to think outside the box, and used a RAMdisk to perhaps load a game. No harm done, just a little wait at first. You HAVE read about the pci-E based drives that are in early development/not yet marketed to the public, right Dave? These kick the butt of the SATA-II bus. But then again we come to - will I notice it? Will my web browser really notice a difference? It's the flood of applications loading at once that will make the difference and the lag in between them: effectly double-clicking and waiting for them to appear. My processor rarely goes over 55%, so I know it can handle it. RAM-based storage is the fastest stuff out there, and I want to try it.

Oh and for what it's worth - page files on the RAMdisk itself DO help. As was said previously, many applications still require a page file. It sounds self-defeating (you could probably pull up my post asking the first question in this thread in fact months ago), but it works. People have done it, and it pulls in more speed. And sticking the cache on the RAMdisk makes a noticeable difference when loading new webpages. This is something you must really try before you render implausible. There is a reason there are many guides for doing it via the main browser window on Mozilla over the net...now I know there are also a lot of other guides out there that are meritless, such as telling one to defrag his/her HDD often, when in fact excessive defragmentation is detrimental, but this one is with merits. Just try it, Dave. It's not a tremendous difference, but it does eliminate the writes to disk, and the little differences add up.

 

Can't we all just get along (again)?

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147058

SAMSUNG MMDOE56G5MXP-0VB 2.5" 256GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail

Image Viewer

Deactivated Item

 

Wonder if its deactivated because Samsung is going to be replacing it with a better/cheaper/larger model or because they've been pulled from retail again?

Maybe they can just go ahead and bring out a 500gb drive and make me very happy (if much poorer)

 

Hmmm....interesting!

 

Strangely that was not what my argument hinged around regarding ramdisks, although some want to make it about that. There's at least 10 other good reasons for my uses which differ on different machines some persistent, some not.

The following's not directed at you specifically just general.
When talking web page performance and web cache performance it introduces all these other variables...

Broadband bandwidth
Network latency to the site
Site bandwidth in feeding data.
Size of page in KB/MB.
Site content (this is a big one because there are sites with I visit several times a day which are 10 monitor screens long with images and RAMDISK actually does make those instant on repeat visits, oops NM sorry forgot ramdisk always worse as web cache)
Firfeox, IE, Chrome - even browser can make a difference, like firefox's implementation of disabling file cache.

Is it mostly server side scripting, client side scripting, heavy server side db? what the site is doing can make this variable to "judging" performance, and IO bottlenecks are the least of ones worries when 10 other variables are stealing performance. The site may take 3 seconds to load and even if ramdisk did provide faster IO, now that's 2.9 seconds due to other variables which are really slowing it down so that's hardly a performance benefit.

All those new performance variables now have to be considered and not ignored in discussing performance results of web caching. Which is why it is entirely fruitless to discuss the merits of ramdisks by discussing web sites in such general terms and with subjective perceptions, because even browsing habits effects this.

So if folks are going to revolve an argument around ramdisk potential with just web traffic then people should be prepared to get specific on every point and then consider the different diversity of content too and address those specifically too. Of course my site visits and content seen will be quite different than others too so don't forget that either.

But it's never been only about web cache...
It's like saying planes are worthless because that one time you got delayed and could have been somewhere quicker by a car. That doesn't automatically invalidate the planes completely. Their actually are other reasons to travel by plane than just a car. And yet if you maintain that layover issue as the big sticking point to air travel, you can build an entire argument around it, heck you may even make a convincing argument to some in thinking planes a foolish way to go.

Which bring me back to my initial comment on ramdisks irregardless of web cache. I won't be convinced ramdisks make my machine slower than a hard drive or SSD regardless how much text one throws at me. I proved it to myself too many times over, although if people don't want to dabble with it so be it, no biggie, I consider it worthwhile. I won't expect everything to be noticeably faster for everyone by using a ramdrive for things like temp files or other caches but it sure as hell isn't slower, infact it shows the maximum IO performance achievable before other bottlenecks come into play like memory subsystem, bus, CPU.

As for merits of web cache I guess that would take pages on the forum to discuss in the detail required, so whatever performance gains might be seen by using it or not using it have just been made null by wasting 30 minutes on academics and hardly a big point.

The problem with ramdisks is there is not enough information of all the cool stuff you can do with them and their benefits. It's usually a web cache and sometimes a temp environment variable or two which is the limit one sees when they look it up on the web.

One example, I use sandboxie, which is a security tool in not allowing any program to make changes to the the OS, it instead takes all file and registry I/O and writes it to a different place making a mirror and isolating the data and processes from other parts of the OS. Now imagine how sandboxed applications can run from a ramdrive when all the writes and registry queries are now being sent to my sandbox on a ramdrive and you begin to see how cool a ramdrive can be as just an addition for Sandboxie. If you ever used process monitor you have an idea how many thousands of operations go on with an app and a majority can run from the ramdrive with sandboxed apps. Now all programs you run through sandboxie, that may not otherwise fit on a ramdrive entirely, all writes they do will always be to ramdrive. It just so happened one day playing with sandboxie that I realized it makes a ramdrive much more beneficial as side effect for all sandboxed applications in forcing them to use the ramdrive. All the sudden a security tool I used actually turned into a performance tweak. That's just one example.

I figured I'd take one last stab at the subject since I included the sandboxie idea it would at least be productive for some sandboxie users.

 

For a RAMDisk, I use the BETA here:
http://www.cenatek.com/product_page_ramdisk_download_list.php

It seems to work well enough though I have had some issues where it doesn't seem to restore the drive properly. It is free fir disks under 4GB.

 

It's probably because just about all of us who commented on it at newegg mentioned Dell. LOL