Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Ram Disks with Dynamic Memory Management?

(1/1)

highend01:
Hey,

is anyone aware of Ram Disks that support  Dynamic Memory Management, apart from Primo Ramdisk?

DMM = The Ram Disk releases any memory that isn't in use anymore (because files were deleted inside the Ram Disk).

E.g.:
Your Ram Disk is set to 8GB
It is currently empty
Now you copy a 4GB file to it, it occupies 4GB of Ram afterwards.
You delete the file and a few seconds later it's back to (nearly) 0.

Primo is rather expensive (I'd like to use a Ram Disk on Windows Server 2012, if possible)...

f0dder:
Didn't know there were actually any product that did this - the only I've seen that was in the same ballpark was vRamDir back in the Win9x days, but that wasn't a fixed-size ramdisk... you pointed it at a folder and then it was basically "try to keep as much as this as possible in RAM".

I'm not sure it's a good idea for a ramdisk anyway? To be able to de/allocate memory like that, it needs more complex code than "just" a ramdisk... filesystem filter driver? And when you have a ramdisk, you generally expect access to it to be instantaneous - if you use a product that does dynamic de/allocation, you risk having to page out other memory in order to satisfy an allocation request. Depending on use case it might be smarter to simply *create* a ramdisk when you need it, and dismount it afterwards?

That's just my :two: - interesting to hear about Primo, though :)

4wd:
This post has a list of most, (if not all), of the RAMdisks available for Windows - over 2 years old but from a quick search there appears to be no new ones.  So you could look through and see if any of the free ones like Gavotte or Imdisk have a beta with that feature.


An interesting, (or not), snippet:

HP was granted a patent for it: Dynamically allocable RAM disk

...only 16 years after the Amiga was already doing it  ;)

Outertech Support:
The freeware ImDisk Toolkit has added the dynamic allocation feature.

It works very well.

http://reboot.pro/files/file/284-imdisk-toolkit/

Navigation

[0] Message Index