Explain RAM drives for me please

nick.lidgett

nick.lidgett

nick.lidgett

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Joined
31 Oct 2011
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Hi guys,

Like the title says i would like somebody to explain RAM drives to me i very simple baby talk.
I have googled this but its all greek to me.

What id like to know is....

What the principles are
What are the ideal specs
What are the practical uses
What are the pros
What are the cons
How do you go about setting it up

Thanks in advance
 
They're pretty simple, you just use a RAM disk program (I used the one mentioned in this guide, but it has limitations), set what size you want (obviously this is based on the amount of RAM you have) and away you go.

Performance was rather incredible, I copied a 3.5GB drive from my SSD to the RAM drive at about 700MB/sec.

If you need incredibly rapid file access I can see there being a benefit, but for gaming etc, I'm not sure there'd be a particularly massive benefit over an SSD.
 
Remember that a RAM drive can only retain it's contents for as long as the PC is on. Shut down and everything's lost.

As a result you can't boot off them and you'll struggle to get installed programs to run off them - you can't install direct to the RAM drive so you'd need to fudge it somehow.

Put it another way, a 60Gb SSD is about the same price as 16Gb of RAM...
 
In the mid to late 80s I had a BBC with a RAM drive - and battery backup. That thing FLEW :D About a thousand times faster than tape, 20 times faster than floppy and a couple of times faster than the 20mb hard drive. THAT was when a RAM drive was worth it :)

Awaits "what's a BBC?" "what's a floppy?" and "don't you mean 20GB?" :p
 
with w vista/7/8 ram drives are pointless unless you have a very specific problem you are trying to resolve..

the reason being they will cache anything they need into ram

(i cannot even think of a good example of when you would need a ram drive with a modern OS)
 
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