virtual hard drive

lopkinfop · 3 Jul 2008 at 17:10

i have just been given a piece of software for free called 'farstone virtual hard drive pro'

you can use it to create a hdd using a proportion of your ram to supposidly speed things up. anyone had any experience with this? would it make things faster?

AbsenceJam · 3 Jul 2008 at 18:30

Called a RAM disk, running things from RAM is very fast indeed.

Fothsn · 3 Jul 2008 at 19:20

How can you run files from you ram? Sounds interesting not something I’ve looked into before.

Pneumonic · 3 Jul 2008 at 20:47

basically loads part of your HDD into RAM and therefore anything on the virtual HDD runs quickly as its not having to do read/write to the HDD... try loading superPi up in a RAM drive and look at the time difference

can get a good 1/2 - 1 second faster on a RAM drive @ 4.2ghz compaired to of the HDD

lopkinfop · 3 Jul 2008 at 20:53

could something like the page file or some other windows component be put there, although would the ram disc need to be mounted after windows loads.

could an application be installed on there such as a divx encoder, or the temp folder for dvd writing (you would need 8gb)

i might have to buy more ram

DavidB · 3 Jul 2008 at 21:28

I use a RAM drive for my internet browsers, makes browsing a fair bit quicker, also faster loads times.

AbsenceJam · 4 Jul 2008 at 11:42

lopkinfop said:
could something like the page file or some other windows component be put there, although would the ram disc need to be mounted after windows loads.

could an application be installed on there such as a divx encoder, or the temp folder for dvd writing (you would need 8gb)

i might have to buy more ram

To mount Windows components in a ramdisk you need a physical ramdisk device, usually an expansion card that takes DIMMS.
You can use them for whatever you like but I'm not sure why you'd want one for writing DVD's, they only write at about 20MB/s tops.

uv · 4 Jul 2008 at 12:58

AbsenceJam said:
To mount Windows components in a ramdisk you need a physical ramdisk device, usually an expansion card that takes DIMMS.

Indeed. There's the Gigabyte I-Ram, but it's fairly hard to get hold of, and only takes DDR1.

DavidB said:
I use a RAM drive for my internet browsers, makes browsing a fair bit quicker, also faster loads times.

Mind me asking what ram-drive software you use?

lopkinfop · 4 Jul 2008 at 13:31

what about games? would they be noticably quicker?

AbsenceJam · 4 Jul 2008 at 21:14

All hard drive speeds do for games is reduce loading times. Given that the slowest loading games are the most recent ones which would require lots of RAM there's no point.
I use a RAM disk for the cache folders for some applications (browser/usenet downloading) to reduce or delay reads and writes to the disk.

philjohn · 4 Jul 2008 at 21:51

lopkinfop said:
could something like the page file or some other windows component be put there, although would the ram disc need to be mounted after windows loads.

Nope, (very basically) the whole purpose of the page file is to be used as virtual memory when you run out of the real stuff...the operating system "pages" in-memory stuff out to disk (normally stuff that hasn't got current focus/execution context). Putting your pagefile in RAM would defeat the purpose of it.

lopkinfop said:
could an application be installed on there such as a divx encoder, or the temp folder for dvd writing (you would need 8gb)

no point, no current home computer can encode DivX or MPEG-2 faster than they can write to disk.

i might have to buy more ram

Save your money, very few things are sped up using ram disks - databases being the only one that springs to mind.

:(Rhodri:) · 4 Jul 2008 at 22:36

Yep PhilJohn's right, not a lot will get a massive speed gain from using a portion of RAM as a virtual harddisk, the limited memory means it's of no real use for loading games off of, and as he points out DVD encoding etc is limited by the speed of the diskdrive these days.

I really can't think of much that'd see much benefit from the faster read/write times on offer. Possibly it could be useful for converting file format's if you could load something on it? Though surely that's CPU limited... I'm not sure and I'm tired so ignore me!

philjohn · 5 Jul 2008 at 00:06

Rhodri2311 said:
I really can't think of much that'd see much benefit from the faster read/write times on offer. Possibly it could be useful for converting file format's if you could load something on it? Though surely that's CPU limited... I'm not sure and I'm tired so ignore me!

Using a ramdisk will in most cases and usage scenarios slow down your computer as you'll actually have less physical RAM available and hence the OS will page stuff faster, leading to massive slow-downs (paging stuff to disk is expensive).

AbsenceJam · 5 Jul 2008 at 00:58

RAM disk aren't really for general use and putting a few things on so programs load a little faster. With games and program files you get a lot of hard drive reading for maybe 30 seconds every so often and you're using the game/program so the affect it has on the rest of the system doesn't matter.
They're better used when there's a lot of I/O going on that is hurting overall performance. In my case my usenet clients use a ram disk for cache, the parts of articles are downloaded to a ram and then the complete files are written out to disk. Without that I'd have constant writes of 2-3MB/s, doesn't sound like much but it slows things down. On a server you might load a whole database into a ram disk.

Snapshot · 5 Jul 2008 at 06:13

A ramdisk program was actually included with MS/DOS. I used it on my first PC (an Apricot) which only had twin floppy drives and no HDD but don't think I did once I'd got one with an HDD. A full MS/DOS boot floppy creates a ramdisk so it has room for all its utilities.