I currently got myself drawn into using a RAMdisk on my netbook. Only for desktops? Only for massive RAM workstations? No need to run system utility cleanups to wipe temp or confidential data. requiring large block erase and write cycles.Īnother benefit of a RAMdisk WITHOUT backup, is that when you power down the PC the data is gone. No matter how big the SSD cache, or the cleverness of wear-leveling algorithmns, if you CAN reduce the number of (unnecessary) writes, you will improve the half-life of your SSD, and in fact will get significant speed ups due to the way SSDs work. There is another significant benefit of using a RAMdisk if you have a SSD. In fact, initial testing on my side, has shown that a RAMdisk can be up to 10x faster than a SSD, and 100x faster than a HDD in some situations. It means, with judicious use, you can get significant speedups over a HDD, even over a SSD. It also turns out to be a lot faster than flash memory (as used by SSDs). It then reloads this image when the computer boots. A software utility creates an image, saves it, before shutting off. RAMdisks/drives can also page-off the data to physical media, like HDD on shutdown. Some devices are designed to draw a small about of memory from the PSU standby power so that the battery is always being charged. When the PC is turned off, the data is retained, so long as the battery has charge. When the PC is turned off, the power is lost, and the data is lost. More hereĪ RAMdrive is like a RAMdisk other than it uses dedicated RAM on separate hardware rather than using an allocation of available system RAM. A RAMdisk is typically set up in available system RAM. Here are my results, and also the discovery that a RAMdisk can even speed up browsing on a netbook that already has a SSD!Ī RAMdisk is a virtual disk that exists in RAM memory rather than as physical media. But with my recent purchase of a SSD for a netbook, and an inability to "move" temp files to a second HDD, I started looking into RAMdisks as a way to manage the write-thrashing issue. I used to be pretty cynical about this stuff. 4 seconds, Photoshop with a giant TIF in just 4.8 seconds and Excel with a huge spreadsheet in just 1.9 seconds.This thread is for discussion of RAMdisks and RAMdrives (software and/or hardware devices). With the two together, we were able to load Word 2010 in a mere. If you can possibly afford it, the combination of SSD with RAM Disk is simply unbeatable. Considering that buying additional RAM is a lot cheaper than upgrading to SSD, many users may find the RAM Disk a cheaper option. However, the SSD alone was noticeably faster than the HDD RAM Disk combo in some cases, particularly when loading the heavy Photoshop CS 5.1 application. However, on a typical PC the Users and Common folders are so huge that you'd need a lot more than 4GB of available RAM Disk space to house them.Īs you can see in the chart, using the RAM Disk with the hard drive cut load times in half. If you use applications that don't write to any folder but C:\Program Files or if you're able to move the entirety of your C:\Program Files\Common Files folder and your C:\Users folder over to the RAM Disk, you'll achieve maximum performance with any storage drive as everything will load from RAM. Because part of the software, at least in our tests, remained on the storage drive, pairing the RAMDisk with an SSD proved the fastest option. However, even with the hard drive, the difference in launch times with the RAM disk was dramatic. To see the difference, we loaded four popular applications - Adobe Reader, Excel 2010, Photoshop CS 5.1 and Word 2010 - onto the hard drive, timed their open times and then installed them on the RAM Disk instead. We then applied the same tests, using a speedy Kingston HyperX SH100S3 SSD instead of a hard drive in the same notebook.īecause most applications leave at least some of their files in a variety of folders on the C drive by default (ex: C:\Program Files\Common Files) none of these applications loaded completely from memory, even after we installed them to the RAM Disk. In real life, these speedy transfer speeds result in much faster application opens.
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