X220 Ram disk Battery life

I just got a ram disk up and running for browser caches and I was wondering how do ram disks generally alter battery life. The indicator on my x220 has been going crazy while my fan is going at 3000rpm even though my temp as at 48-49C. Is the ram disk generating more strain on my system? and heat? or is because the power indicator just do not know how to calculate with a ram disk?

 

If you have a RAM disk, then the CPU won't have to wait for the drive to feed it data to process, so it'll do more computations per second = higher load => higher temperatures.

 

thanks for the response! I assumed as much. From what I understand ram is always powered and regardless so if I make a ram disk for cache-ing then all that will do is reduce usage of my ssd drive correct? and not add any additional power drain other than higher cpu utilization?

 

Actually, for most general usage, the above doesn't apply. A ramdisk can be viewed as tuning the I/O subsystem, ala much faster However, all tuning does is change what you wait on. So, unless you're in the very unusual situation of having a lonnggggggg running job, a ramdisk will just feed the cpu chip(s) much faster, resulting in the work getting done -much- quicker.

Yes, if you kept the cpu humming for extended times, the temps would go up. But, most of the time, your work will just finish much sooner and the cpu will go back to sleep.

You should see an overall drop in juice requirements, as a ramdisk requires very little battery drain compared to powering a conventional spinning hard drive. There won't be as big a diff if you're comparing a ramdisk to an SSD, but there would still be a minor difference.

If you're new to ramdisks, you'll probably be amazed at how quickly I/O works, and how fast job(s) finish.

 

Yea the ram disk has been really cool. But since I have an ssd, it's possible that a lot of the "faster" might just be subjective to me. I'm only utilizing my ram disk for browser cache and windows 7 temp files. Would you recommend using the ram disk for anything else of that nature?