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Nice guide to using a RAM disk

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f0dder:
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

4wd:
@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:
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?-4wd (May 08, 2016, 08:53 PM)
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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).

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