ssd owners do you use your ssd's for ram?

Ninja Please! · 21 May 2009 at 18:42

Hey mates,

I'm trying to find the article I read but I could have swore I read that ssd's can be faster then ram and you can use programs to partition part of your ssd to be used as ram for this reason. Due to me only currently having 5gb's left on my vertex, I figured I'll just stick with the 6gb ram I have already. Are any of you ssd owners using your drives for ram and if so what kind of benefits in real world use are you getting?

Thanks in advance for any replies

Craig321 · 21 May 2009 at 18:43

You could use it for the page file I guess, but I've not heard of it being used for the system's main RAM. It'd be slower anyway due to the controller IIRC.

Ninja Please! · 21 May 2009 at 18:45

Craig321 said:
You could use it for the page file I guess, but I've not heard of it being used for the system's main RAM. It'd be slower anyway due to the controller IIRC.

Maybe that's what I'm thinkin of...

alex24 · 21 May 2009 at 18:52

Yeah, no way an SSD is going to beat RAM. I would think it would be the pagefile indeed. I stick my pagefile on my fastest drive, which is a 1TB drive, so an SSD would be an improvement, though I don't think it'd be as mind-boggling as you think. Putting the whole OS and pagefile on an SSD would speed things up a LOT.

mattyg · 21 May 2009 at 18:57

There was an article in PC format or another mag 10 yrs back or so.

Were they had a program that would boot windows (98or95) into ram on startup.

It would take a little longer to boot up but would then fly.

Wonder what happened to that??

Matt

alex24 · 21 May 2009 at 19:10

There have been several (I think) PCI modules that allowed RAM to be used as storage (gigabyte i-ram was one maybe), but I don't think they allowed booting off them, which presents a large problem, thus they were never that popular.

FaceplantSi · 21 May 2009 at 20:41

There is a guide here from Tony on OCZ Forums about using a Ramdrive with SSD's, but that's the other way around - using spare system RAM as a virtual HDD.

Ninja Please! · 21 May 2009 at 21:23

^^my brain must have been backwards that day. That was the article I was thinking of.

malcolm · 21 May 2009 at 22:53

FaceplantSi said:
There is a guide here from Tony on OCZ Forums about using a Ramdrive with SSD's, but that's the other way around - using spare system RAM as a virtual HDD.

From my personal experience it helped my SSD equipped netbook make the best of a cheap SSD drive, but it made start-up and shut down times a lot longer. I've now loaded Windows 7 and it is just as good without using Ramdrive.

Well Splattered · 22 May 2009 at 00:45

alexhull24 said:
There have been several (I think) PCI modules that allowed RAM to be used as storage (gigabyte i-ram was one maybe), but I don't think they allowed booting off them, which presents a large problem, thus they were never that popular.

You could install XP onto an i-ram. It was bootable too, but sadly it was not very stable (in my experience).
i-ram has now been surpassed by modern SSD's in both read and write speed due to its SATA150 connector.

I use ramdiskVE with spare system ram and can confirm that a RAMdrive made from system memory is very quick once its loaded. E.G. once in windows, I can create a RAMdrive and load an image about 6gb in size in about a min from my SSD array.

With my RAMdrive I get about 2000mb/s Read and write
with my SSD array I get about 170mb/s Read and 120mb/s write.
with the i-ram array it was (IIRC) 120mb/s read and write.

Hope that helps

JonJ678 · 22 May 2009 at 02:02

As above really, ramdisk is definitely quicker than ssd. A nice combination arises by putting /tmp and /var into ramdisks, basically anything that doesn't matter.

You still can run operating systems from ram, there's a project for is using ubuntu. It loads an image from hard drive, chroots into it, loads the rest of itself, unmounts the hard drive and away you go. Designed for the eee. It's very quick. Similarly, you can make a ramdisk, and put a virtualbox copy of xp in it. Also very quick.

The advice is generally to not use a ssd for swap / paging file, as it hammers the drive. For older ones which stutter that's crippling, for newer ones it just encourages wearing them out. Either way, an ssd with 4+ gb of ram doesn't really need a paging file for anything so it doesn't matter very much.

alex24 · 22 May 2009 at 09:57

Well Splattered said:
You could install XP onto an i-ram. It was bootable too, but sadly it was not very stable (in my experience).
i-ram has now been surpassed by modern SSD's in both read and write speed due to its SATA150 connector.

I use ramdiskVE with spare system ram and can confirm that a RAMdrive made from system memory is very quick once its loaded. E.G. once in windows, I can create a RAMdrive and load an image about 6gb in size in about a min from my SSD array.

With my RAMdrive I get about 2000mb/s Read and write
with my SSD array I get about 170mb/s Read and 120mb/s write.
with the i-ram array it was (IIRC) 120mb/s read and write.

Hope that helps

That's interesting, I guess that i-ram is quite old now anyway. I can see how the ramdisk could be useful in all sorts of situations.