Ram Disk anyone?
- Thread starter Energize
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Associate
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Still its a nice wee toy to play with
Edit : just copied a 1.8Gb file in seconds flat on a 4Gb drive
And for certain tasks such as encoding and/or editing large files (that are written back to disk straight away), it will make it massively faster. There are definitely plenty of valid usage scenarios apart from just being cool.
Soldato
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Has anybody seen the RAM-SAN? The name kinda speaks for itself.http://www.ramsan.com/products/4
basically a ramdisk of DDR2 , with SSD for backup. The price must be outrageous. But I'd buy one^H^H^H two when I win the lotto.
basically a ramdisk of DDR2 , with SSD for backup. The price must be outrageous. But I'd buy one^H^H^H two when I win the lotto.
It was called i-ram, the product could only take 4GB of ram and it was limited to 150MB/s by the SATA I bus, so it inevitably failed. No hard drive can compete with ram disks like this because you are limited by the SATA 3 bus to 600MB/s.
And for those of us who aren't using windows, see here for an example of running the operating system itself from ram.
Ramdisks are good though.
The good ram disk apps will copy data to/from hdd at boot/shutdown.
Yea I was using one for ArmA2 before I bought an SSD, they are awesome if you have enough ram.
I used one from HERE basically it's free to use as long as you keep the ramdisk under 4GB
Ok, I downloaded this one, but it only lets me make 2 Gb with fat 16 or 32. I can only make 4 Gb unformatted, but will that still be usable?
Also if I make a 4 Gb ramdisk, will my remaining 8 Gb still work at triple channel bandwidth or be reduced to dual channel?
The program just stays stuck on 'RAMdisk started successfully' with a full blue bar and nothing more is happening
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I think the maximum you can do in fat16/32 is 2GB, but if you make the disk size 4GB unformatted > go to the load and save tab > check the disk label box > name your disk to whatever you like say RAMDISK > then click Start Ramdisk.
To format the ramdisk go to > Administrative tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management, here you should find your unformatted Ramdisk, you can change the letter of the drive to R if you like to help identify the disk.
Then right click on the Ramdisk and select > Format > Quick Format > NTFS, you should now have a NTFS Ramdisk.
Now you can just copy files or programs to the Ramdisk and run them from there.
Click on start Ramdisk and you should be good to go.
If you want to save the contents for use after a system shutdown or whatever, go back to the DataRam program window, click on the Load Save tab > tick the Save Disk Image on Shutdown > Select the location to save the image in the box below.
You can use different file names to save different data that you might want to use in the Ramdisk.
Once you have done this click Stop Ramdisk and the image will be saved at the specified location.
If you want the Ramdisk to load up certain files/programs on startup just tick the Load Disk Image at Startup Box and select the file.
Phew it takes longer to write than to do
anyway that should get you going.
To format the ramdisk go to > Administrative tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management, here you should find your unformatted Ramdisk, you can change the letter of the drive to R if you like to help identify the disk.
Then right click on the Ramdisk and select > Format > Quick Format > NTFS, you should now have a NTFS Ramdisk.
Now you can just copy files or programs to the Ramdisk and run them from there.
Click on start Ramdisk and you should be good to go.
If you want to save the contents for use after a system shutdown or whatever, go back to the DataRam program window, click on the Load Save tab > tick the Save Disk Image on Shutdown > Select the location to save the image in the box below.
You can use different file names to save different data that you might want to use in the Ramdisk.
Once you have done this click Stop Ramdisk and the image will be saved at the specified location.
If you want the Ramdisk to load up certain files/programs on startup just tick the Load Disk Image at Startup Box and select the file.
Phew it takes longer to write than to do
anyway that should get you going.
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You can save the ramdisk to image without having to reboot the machine (it will even do it automatically if you want after a given interval time, but I prefer to do it manually).
Also once the ramdisk is started, if you don't see anything, you're probably expecting the wrong thing (like a disk icon to appear in My Computer).
It gives you an unpartitioned disk, you have to use Disk Manager to partition it into volumes and then assign those volumes to empty directories (for example, I have a couple of game log file directories mapped to a ramdisk volume so that writes don't cause micro stutters, but the rest of the game loads from conventional disk as normal), or to drive letters, as you wish.
I do also have it load/save the image on startup/shutdown (of the ramdisk driver, which may or may not be on the startup/shutdown of the OS, you can control it whilst the OS is running too).
Also once the ramdisk is started, if you don't see anything, you're probably expecting the wrong thing (like a disk icon to appear in My Computer).
It gives you an unpartitioned disk, you have to use Disk Manager to partition it into volumes and then assign those volumes to empty directories (for example, I have a couple of game log file directories mapped to a ramdisk volume so that writes don't cause micro stutters, but the rest of the game loads from conventional disk as normal), or to drive letters, as you wish.
I do also have it load/save the image on startup/shutdown (of the ramdisk driver, which may or may not be on the startup/shutdown of the OS, you can control it whilst the OS is running too).
Can I use this Ram Disk for Opera browser? How do I do that? I have Opera installed in Program Files, and Opera cache is in C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera\cache.
Do I need to install Opera in Ram Disk partiton or I can somehow map already installed Opera to Ram Disk, and how can I do that? I have Dataram RamDisk.
Do I need to install Opera in Ram Disk partiton or I can somehow map already installed Opera to Ram Disk, and how can I do that? I have Dataram RamDisk.
Soldato
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just uninstall Opera and then reinstall it in the ramdisk. That will save a lot of hassle.
Let's say you want to give 100MB to the cache (and you know which folder it is normally in, you gotta find it).
Create your RAMDisk big enough to hold all your desired volumes (could be 4GB or whatever).
Now on this disk create a 100MB partition, don't assign it a drive letter.
Locate the folder you want to map it to, and make sure the folder is empty. If it's not and you intend to persist the contents of the volume (save image to disk / load it on start) you can move the contents out temporarily so it is empty.
Then in Disk Manager (Windows -> right click My Computer -> select Manage) assign the 100MB volume to that path.
Once done, you can go back to the directory, which is now mapped to the RAMDisk, and copy back anything to it you took out.
Just be warned that if you don't save the image, any files or subdirectories you copied back to the RAMDisk from their original location will be lost.
Experiment with some totally new and temporary directories first with some dummy files you put copies of into it, until you are comfortable you're not going to lose any data there you want to keep when crashing or shutting down or losing power.
Create your RAMDisk big enough to hold all your desired volumes (could be 4GB or whatever).
Now on this disk create a 100MB partition, don't assign it a drive letter.
Locate the folder you want to map it to, and make sure the folder is empty. If it's not and you intend to persist the contents of the volume (save image to disk / load it on start) you can move the contents out temporarily so it is empty.
Then in Disk Manager (Windows -> right click My Computer -> select Manage) assign the 100MB volume to that path.
Once done, you can go back to the directory, which is now mapped to the RAMDisk, and copy back anything to it you took out.
Just be warned that if you don't save the image, any files or subdirectories you copied back to the RAMDisk from their original location will be lost.
Experiment with some totally new and temporary directories first with some dummy files you put copies of into it, until you are comfortable you're not going to lose any data there you want to keep when crashing or shutting down or losing power.