RAM Disk vs SSD

Will a RAM Disk really improve performance that much? I have read a guide and I am seriously thinking about trying this?
(http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?63273-*-Windows-7-Ultimate-Tweaks-Utilities-*)

So having 6 gig of ram would mean I have a max of 6 gig that I could use for a RAM Disk?

Please be gentle never heard of it before and just interested.
Thanks

1) If you create a RAM disk then you lose access to that RAM for normal use

2) When you power off the PC the content of the RAM disk is lost so it's not possible to boot from one.

Given these the possible uses for a RAM disk are fairly limited and will only give a worthwhile performance improvement in certain specific circumstances.

3) Ram assigned to ramdisk is no longer available for windows use, so windows is more likely to need the swap file, slowing performance down again. Swapfile on ramdisk is faster than swapfile on a physical disk true, but page swapping is considerably more intensive (thus slow) than simply accessing ram. Unless you always have many gigabytes of unused ram, then your better off without a ramdisk in most cases.

I have 6GB of ram in my system, and I wouldnt want to assign any of it to a ramdisk.

i tried ramdisk, amazing performance.

best used if you have lots ram.

you have 6gigs, but windows needs atleast 2gigs to run properly.
so you could have 4gigs of ramdisk. its not much so most people dont even bother and the fact you would need to reload everything after a restart.

i dont know if ramdisk software has improved, its been a while since i tried it.

i dont see the need for ramdisk, go with ssd sata 3

They are good if you've got something specific you want to use, and can take the time setting things up with automatic backups and redirecting files.
If you have an SSD though theres very little that's worth all the effort.

This is pretty good, have used it recently when playing with pagefiles.
http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

I wouldn't assign 4GB out of 6, that's just crazy, unless it was for a specific purpose (multipass encoding springs to mind, but only if SSD/HD is the bottleneck).

just tried ramdisk again.

moved 2gigs of diablo2 lod into ramdisk (to my surprise it only took a few secs), and played online, its much faster at loading and buffering images at the start. according to my fps counter i was getting over 600 fps! havent seen it that high before

installed portable firefox in the ramdisk and loaded faster than chrome.

i'm using a laptop with corei7, i should try to benchmark it but hdtach doesnt work with win7

just benched it, 4k mb/s reads on my laptop

Hehe, I never thought to benchmark a ramdisk
Is your storage overclocked?

cool as


can you raid a ram disc over the sticks and overclock ?

laptop is stock, you cant raid direct memory, but it can be overclocked

Multichannel RAM is equivalent to RAID0

Strange how these ideas crop up periodically. I've spent some time playing with these things, and am in the process of setting up one to boot from.

Under windows they rely on 3rd party software which I found very unreliable. It's also impossible (I believe) to boot from one, which rather reduces the speed advantages.

However under linux it's a slightly different story. There's quite a good post here about moving temporary files onto one, and logging to one. The reasoning is that ssds don't really appreciate large numbers of small, random writes, so if you direct them all at a ramdisk the drive doesn't stall. Not as relevant now that ssds use local memory, and unless you bother backing up the logs it does eradicate them upon reboot. Firefox cache in ramdisk makes browsing a little quicker and is probably "more secure", whatever that might mean.

If you use virtualbox, and happen to put the virtual machines "hard drive" onto a ramdisk, it boots ludicrously fast and is generally quite nice to use. Haven't found a particularly sensible use for this trick yet.

Linux calls an initrd, initial ramdisk, early on in the boot process. This can be altered to do pretty much whatever you wish, a post here is what I'm currently playing with.

IsaacKuo said:

This details a method of loading your entire OS into an uncompressed ramdisk. The result is lightning fast performance, and elimination of hard drive noise and power consumption (if swap is not used and the hard drive is spun down).

Click to expand...

I want to get my netbook doing this, and probably my desktop as well. Obviously it's useful to have /home mounted somewhere physical, but if changes to /etc and so forth vanish on reboot, doesn't matter so much.

I've been convinced ramdisks are amazing for easily a year now, but I admit using them for anything practical takes some imagination.

I use a ram disk for my mail servers temporary files, rate limit dbs, cached callouts, etc. This is with exim on a linux box. They can be very useful in specific circumstances. As long as you're prepared to lose the data if the box were to power off suddenly or crash.