Thinking of setting up a RAM disk

[M20]

Hmm. Been thinking about downloading software to set up a RAM disk on my PC. Any thoughts?

I have about 12GB of RAM, the most I have seen used is a bout 6GB what do you guys recommend?

[sking]

I would be kind of surprised if you get much benefit from a RAM disk, but I suppose it depends on what you will use it for. I would say, if that's what you want to do, go ahead and try out some sizes, but you might want to take a look at RAM disks explained first.

[Wallizzle]

Will it be any better than buying say and SSD?

[M20]

i saw some benchmarks of rates of around 5000 Mb/s.

[M20]

I would be kind of surprised if you get much benefit from a RAM disk, but I suppose it depends on what you will use it for. I would say, if that's what you want to do, go ahead and try out some sizes, but you might want to take a look at RAM disks explained first.

Well I do designs consisting of large assemblies and because that program tends to be crash prone sometimes a lot of work gets undone. Due to the file sizes involved the files take a long time to save. A lot of time is wasted saving files to the hard disk. I rather save to hard disk once or twice after a good amount of work than save multiple times to it. So I figured the Ram drive would be handy to save the files in between those times.

[M20]

OK guys i used a software called soft-perfect ramdisk. Using about 7GB of ram out of 12 GB now. the ramdisk is 4000MB.. everything seems ok so far...

[Wallizzle]

I still can't understand why you'd opt for a RAM drive over a cheaper SSD and save your memory for more important things though? There are like SSDs pushing crazy transfer rates these days.

What happens in between the big saves if something should happen like a crash or accidentally shutdown or something?

[sking]

Well I do designs consisting of large assemblies and because that program tends to be crash prone sometimes a lot of work gets undone. Due to the file sizes involved the files take a long time to save. A lot of time is wasted saving files to the hard disk. I rather save to hard disk once or twice after a good amount of work than save multiple times to it. So I figured the Ram drive would be handy to save the files in between those times.

Ok, that makes sense.

[sking]

OK guys i used a software called soft-perfect ramdisk. Using about 7GB of ram out of 12 GB now. the ramdisk is 4000MB.. everything seems ok so far...

"everything seems ok so far"? So did you get a benefit or not.

[M20]

Yes I noticed faster file saving. But my system speed was noticeably slower even when I unmounted the Ram disk. I don't know if it just my perception but I just felt windows and other programs was slower. I even had a blue screen once after I shut down... must be because the computer went into sleep mode a few times with the ram disk running.



I think I can definitely say that yes reading and saving files from the disk is VERY fast, but feel that the rest of your system will suffer a bit. And if 90 percent of the time you are using your regular hard drives, NOT the files on the ramdisk... I think getting a large SSD makes more sense.

The last SSD I bout was a bit pricey for the storage but I never regret it! lol I need a bigger one now since prices have halved since then.