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Author Topic: Nice guide to using a RAM disk  (Read 10786 times)

xtabber

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Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« on: May 27, 2014, 12:15 PM »
TechARP has posted the RAM Disk Guide Rev. 2.0, a useful guide to when and how to use a ram disk under Windows.


40hz

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #1 on: May 27, 2014, 01:18 PM »
Nice find.

RAM disks are like the proverbial tennis racquet argument: You don't often need one - but when you do, there's no real substitute.

RAM disks have gone out of vogue a bit due to the speed of today's disk technologies. And I'm not completely sure how much value they might bring to the desktop environment. But for certain situations (on servers) they're a very handy option to have.

Thx for sharing. :Thmbsup:

IainB

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #2 on: May 30, 2014, 09:16 AM »
Thansk @xtabber, that's a rather useful Guide, after reading which I have downloaded and installed SoftPerfect RAMdisk for a trial.

guoguo yong

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #3 on: June 17, 2014, 10:01 PM »
Thanks you all

HankFriedman

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #4 on: November 01, 2014, 04:17 PM »
I installed SoftPerfect RAMdisk and used it for a while, and it caused a such wicked crash and blue screen (Win 7 64 bit) that I had to restore my system from a backup.

Never again!

4wd

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #5 on: November 01, 2014, 10:12 PM »
I installed SoftPerfect RAMdisk and used it for a while, and it caused a such wicked crash and blue screen (Win 7 64 bit) that I had to restore my system from a backup.

I've been using it for the last couple of years, a 2GB RAM drive on Win 7 x64 and now 8.1 x64 - no problems at all.

Zero3K

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #6 on: May 06, 2016, 11:24 AM »
I use Bond Disc (http://www.bonddisc.com) to make a 640 MB RAM Disk that is set to be the R: drive and I store my Browser's Cache, Printer Spool, and Flash Cookies on it (by making a Symbolic Link that points to its location on my HDD). I have it set to backup to C:\ramdisk.sna (via Drive Snapshot) every night (via Task Scheduler) and on reboot (via Shutter). I then set it up to restore from C:\ramdisk.sna to R: on login (via Drive Snapshot). Its REALLY FAST and works well on Windows 10 (not sure about Windows 8 ).

EDIT: A screenshot of a benchmark I just did is attached so you all can see exactly how fast it is.
« Last Edit: June 09, 2016, 02:33 PM by Zero3K »

4wd

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #7 on: May 06, 2016, 05:57 PM »
Switched to ImTool about 6 months ago because of its Dynamic RAM disk ability, it only uses what it needs the rest is available for the OS, (similar to what the Amiga used to have).

So now have a 6GB RAM disk set as system temp, works well on Win10 x64.

x16wda

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vi vi vi - editor of the beast

IainB

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #9 on: May 08, 2016, 12:28 AM »
40hz and x16wda: Many thanks for the useful reference to ImDisk and the ghacks review of same.

f0dder

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #10 on: May 08, 2016, 03:05 PM »
Hm, dynamic sizing in ImDisk now? That sounds interesting. Last time I looked at ImDisk, it just seemed slightly weird and a bit too much bother. I wonder how well dynamic memory sizing works - pagefile usage (whether from ImDisk or paging out other applications) would probably be an unacceptable speed hit.

I've been using SoftPerfect RAM Disk for quite a while. It's easy to use, good featureset (persistent disks with flush-changes-every-N-minutes are crucial for me), and has good I/O performance
- carpe noctem

4wd

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #11 on: May 08, 2016, 08:53 PM »
@x16wda: Thanks for the links, I was on the tablet at the time.

@fodder: I guess it depends on your usage, I'm used to the Amiga where RAM is just another drive so I'm constantly using it as such, eg. extracting/creating archives in it, writing files to it, system temp files, etc - anything where I don't care if the data is lost.

With 24GB I don't use a pagefile and the dynamic sizing it means that almost all the RAM is still available for the system if it needs it, even then I have run out of RAM occasionally :)

You could flush the RAM drive to disk every few minutes but you'd have to do it via Task Scheduler or set up a command/Powershell script that checks for the existence and then executes the command, (rawcopy -mld \\.\R: C:\ramdisk.img).
I would have thought you'd get a performance hit from doing that every few minutes though?

f0dder

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Re: Nice guide to using a RAM disk
« Reply #12 on: May 09, 2016, 06:47 PM »
4wd: I used to love vramdir on win9x, it basically tried to cache as much of a folder/mountpoint in memory as possible - this worked extremely well, and wasn't a ramdisk as such. I assume ImDisk in dynamic mode still has a fixed upper limit and shows up with a drive letter? IMHO that's the worst of both worlds - you still impose a maxsize, you risk paging (if you set a maxsize that's too large), and even though you might get the disk hit penalty, you don't have persistant storage.

I would have thought you'd get a performance hit from doing that every few minutes though?
Not when you're only writing the changed parts :)

Sure, there's some overhead in dirty-tracking, but it works pretty well. What you get is a guarenteed max memory usage, guaranteed performance characteristics of the ramdrive, relatively-consistent behavior with performance you can reason about. It works very well for %temp% and data storage for a few applications - but I do need to do a little manual work every now and then for installers and whatnot.

The arragenment works pretty well, though. And if I need a ramdisk for temporary purposes (manipulating an ISO file or other kinds of virtual filesystem shenanigans, doing some raw manipulation on 100k web profiles, whatever) it's nice having a tool that lets me create a temporary ramdisk for that purpose, rather than having to reserve space for that all along (if ImDisk doesn't do this very smartly, just reserving the capacity takes a bunch of memory).
- carpe noctem