RAMDisk's?

[paradisiac]

ok, i have 24GB of ram and windows 8 64bit. taskmanager shows i rarely use more than 4-6GB of ram, so was thinking maybe set a 10-15GB RAMDisk and maybe move temp files etc to that. now my question is A) is this wise and B) what folders would be best moved?
also, could i install things like google chrome, xbmc etc to the RAMDisk and they run faster?

 

[paradisiac]

Its best not to install anything to the RAM disk, once you switch off the PC or you get a Crash, anything that is in RAM is lost.
Maybe page file? this a big maybe like has I never used a RAMdisk before so what I say here may not be 100%
Edit
On a second note I think RAMdisk software move the files you have on the RAMdisk onto the Hard-drive when shutting down to save them, but still if you crash you will loose everything stored on the RAMdisk

ah didnt think about crashing, i know it saves it to a file on hard drive when you shutdown, so that would be safe, but the crashing thing could be an issue.

 

[paradisiac]

true, most program if not all the latest now do this, but as many of us now use uninterruptible power supplies anyway it none less safe than a standard sdd, which is 50/50 also on a power cut if it saves your data or not.

i've used a few now for a couple of years and wouldn't game without one, any game that lets you cache some of the data elsewhere, which most do now days would be loads faster with ram drives, easy to set up, easy to use, just need to be more care full with power yes for some users, think of any game which works of a disk, i just make a image Daemon tools lite and load that to my ram drive, game saves to sdd and caches off ram disk, speed is more than 20x faster than sdd alone, as i mainly play single player games like total war, have no idear what multi player ones would be like so can't comment on them, i'd guess you would still be waiting for others to catch up so guess it would be of no help for those online games etc

please remember i'm talking about software ram drives, not hardware ones either, as cost's are still too high tbh

which files do you need to move to the ram drive to get the speed increases in games? is there a common cache folder or will it be game specific? are there any windows cache/temp folders that would be advantageous to move to a ramdisk?

 

[paradisiac]

ok one quick, and probably very stupid question, how do you change the location of the temp folder to the ramdisk with the programs knowing where to look?

 

[paradisiac]

ok so i have set up a 12GB ramdisk and moved the appdata/local/temp and windows/temp (TEMP + TMP) folders using system properties (environment variables), IE Cache using internet options, XBMC and Chrome user data files using ​mklink /J, what else should i move over to the ramdisk to speed things up?