Are RAMDisks viable?

[evo4ever86]

Hello all.

Just a quick question... Are there any case uses for RAMDisks? I mean what attracts me to them is they're astronomical speed and latencies. But the problem is they're volatile however I think there's potentially a way around it by using something called a "Junction" which basically means the data on a RAMDisk gets transferred to a normal hard drive before the PC is powered down. Is it worth exploring?

Cheers guys.

 

[Rroff]

In most uses no, outside of specific uses you'll always a hit IO bottleneck or limitation with anything much faster than PCI-e 3.0 NVME speeds and the volatility adds extra awkwardness. Some RAM caching software does exist, which doesn't have the volatility issue and/or minimises the volatility issue - more designed around hybrid HDD use but again application is limited.

 

[evo4ever86]

In most uses no, outside of specific uses you'll always a hit IO bottleneck or limitation with anything much faster than PCI-e 3.0 NVME speeds and the volatility adds extra awkwardness. Some RAM caching software does exist, which doesn't have the volatility issue and/or minimises the volatility issue - more designed around hybrid HDD use but again application is limited.

Yeah I agree which feels sort of disappointing. But as an example wouldn't it be interesting to see how fast a game would load if it was installed on a DDR5 RAMDisk or would it be unnoticeable?

 

[Rroff]

Yeah I agree which feels sort of disappointing. But as an example wouldn't it be interesting to see how fast a game would load if it was installed on a DDR5 RAMDisk?

With a lot of games the loading time is bottlenecked, once you are up to around PCI-e 3.0 NVME speeds, by processing the data being loaded rather than the loading itself - typically you gain maybe 10% but you can also gain that kind of benefit from some solid state drives which have a better controller and/or more optimised memory access procedures than average. There may be some minor benefits in games which stream assets in real time where you may get less pop in and stutter but again that bonus is often limited by the processing side involved rather than the storage IO.

I've not encountered it myself but some people have reported issues with RAM disks and gaming when playing games which use kernel level anti-cheat, etc.

 

[evo4ever86]

With a lot of games the loading time is bottlenecked, once you are up to around PCI-e 3.0 NVME speeds, by processing the data being loaded rather than the loading itself - typically you gain maybe 10% but you can also gain that kind of benefit from some solid state drives which have a better controller and/or more optimised memory access procedures than average. There may be some minor benefits in games which stream assets in real time where you may get less pop in and stutter but again that bonus is often limited by the processing side involved rather than the storage IO.

I've not encountered it myself but some people have reported issues with RAM disks and gaming when playing games which use kernel level anti-cheat, etc.

So should I steer away from the idea of investing in RAMDisks then?

 

[robj20]

Only thing I use a RAM disk for is Plex transcoding, saves wear and tear on the M.2.
I wouldn't trust them to any important data but as cache drives they can be handy.

 

[Rroff]

Only thing I use a RAM disk for is Plex transcoding, saves wear and tear on the M.2.
I wouldn't trust them to any important data but as cache drives they can be handy.

True could be useful if you regularly record gameplay, etc. though modern solid state drives are relatively robust against that kind of wear but it doesn't harm to avoid it either, as long as you aren't bothered by the chance of losing the footage if you forget to copy over what you want to keep and/or unexpected power loss.

 

[Smffy]

I used to run Nvidia Shadowplay on RAM for the instant replay feature which is sort of a constant writing to disc so I thought it was ideal. If I hit save clip it saved to proper storage, worked well didn’t have to rinse a proper disc with constant write.

Not doing that now I don’t have a need for it but it’s almost ideal as temporary data storage.

 

[SonicSW20]

They were viable for "consumer" applications in 2006.

Today a modern platform paired with a performant Gen4 or Gen5 SSD will not give you a storage related performance limitation in most practical scenarios.

 

[iamgigglz]

I'm using a ramdisk on my gaming machine as a temp drive for nVidia Replay. I really don't like the thought of it constantly writing to my SSD for hours on end.
I've given it 4GB out of the 32GB I have and haven't noticed any ill effects, although I'm keen to upgrade to 48GB or 64GB soon.

The only other use case I've found that helps is when extracting extremely large zip archives with many small files.
Copy the zip to the ram drive first, then extract back to SSD. Stops the SSD having read and write at the same time and drastically improves extraction time.

 

[Meddling-Monk]

If you don't know what you'll be using for a RAMDisk, the likelihood is you have no need of it.

I myself have been using RAMDisks for the better part of near two decades. Back in mid 00's SSD's were a lot more unknown on reliability and a RAMDisk where everything was being wrote to would reduce the writes that are used up on the SSD. I have one SSD from way back when now that's still over (I think) 94% fine and that dropped in the end becuase I had retired that SSD to a different system that wrote onto it a lot more afterwards. Otherwise, I typically use RAMDisks because I do image work (mostly photo restoration and recovery) as well as video work (mostly restoration and archival) and in both of these cases you end up doing LOADS of writes (sometimes multiple times of the same thing to try and get a second or more of a cleaner shot), both as backup and as temp files/scratch files. So rather than hit any SSD, I move it all to the RAMDisk instead. Recently, I have also begun to record gaming sessions to provide tutorials on completing quests in games, as well as to make fun videos of stuff in games. Which is better if recorded onto the RAMDisk first, as it's constantly being written onto, then review and archive to storage after once I've made sure I captured what I wanted.

It's also super fun loading up whole games into the RAMDisk, but very few games can actually make loading any faster, because as mentioned earlier in this thread, there are loading bottlenecks where it is not IO limited and thus the amazing speeds and latency with the RAMDisk does not present a faster experience in most cases. Also, most games have outsized typical RAMDisk sizes for the last few years now. The last decade, it was still possible to do something like load up Mass Effect Andromeda into the RAMDisk and run it off there, as it was only 45GB in size roughly. These days, you're looking at 100GB to 150GB in size on average. And very few users will have the necessary 192GB or 256GB of RAM to create a RAMDisk to load in a modern game (and still have enough memory spare) to see if they can get better load times off of them.

The only other thing was of course, for things you don't want touching actual long term storage, so stuff on the RAMDisk is conveniently "lost" if something amiss were to happen, or it's stuff you know shouldn't be kept on long term storage. (Work stuff in particular in certain fields)