Ram Disk

[cvidler]

Originally Posted by Phido

RAM disks were essential before computers had hard disks. Most computers loaded the system files onto a ram disk so you wouldn't have to load the the system disk every time you loaded your game.

Com files are an oddity, they were almost exclusively written in assembly, hand coded, and could only be a maximum of 64kb. They had to be loaded at a certain point in memory and overwrite anything already at that address (like command.com = the executable that is MS-OS).

One of the reasons I am looking at building a setup with 64Gb ram is so that I can use a large ram disk. My programming tools aren't 64bit, and I don't really have the time to migrate to something that does 64bit well. Even within 64bit, handling 32-48gb of memory is a PIA. A much easier way to solve this is by using your regular every file I/O. And loading 2Gb at a time per process but having all of it in ram so its almost as fast as if you have rewritten the whole thing in 64bit.

Think about a database, you could have many requests from many users at the same time. To search the database, you don't need a 64bit version of your dbase software, you plonk the thing on a ram disk. Your searches of 32gb of database are mere seconds compared to minutes hours on a HD (esp if there are multiple requests). No recoding, no rewriting for a new system, no risk, maximum scalability.

That's very poor coding practice. It'd be faster again if it was using 64-bit addresses, and not having to 'page' 2GB chunks to/from a file system (with it's overheads).

/deals with databases where 1TB is a 'baby' (or dev) one.

[pher0x]

Originally Posted by Phido

No recoding, no rewriting for a new system, no risk, maximum scalability.

Putting your database on a ram disk? No risk? Perhaps if it's a read-only slave.

[issa2006]

Originally Posted by Tarkhein

http://www.asrock.com/feature/XFast/xfastram/index.asp

its no good, it creates a exfat, not ntfs, so you cant use it with eboostr etc...and its does not load save ramdisk image at windows start /exit

thats why i use primo ramdrive one.

it can set up temp file to ram drive(which are lost at reload)

(but you can do that manually)

[Phido]

That's very poor coding practice. It'd be faster again if it was using 64-bit addresses, and not having to 'page' 2GB chunks to/from a file system (with it's overheads).

/deals with databases where 1TB is a 'baby' (or dev) one.

Indeed. How silly of me not to code for x86 64bit back in 96.. I should have made it in ASM too, with tight hand coded loops.
While there are overheads they aren't that bad. I haven't done back to back comparisons, depending how much paging its probably 0-10%.

Adobe has been coding for paging for donkeys. While it may not be the neatest solution in the galaxy. It works for things where your working on a subset of data and not bouncing around the place.

Putting your database on a ram disk? No risk? Perhaps if it's a read-only slave.

Im not talking about running a bank off it. Most of my stuff is scientific, working on data (stuff like astronomical radio telescope data reduction). So its only the end result I'm really worry about. Power interruption isn't really an issue because I just rerun. With databases many are only updated at night from another seperate database so its a read only and updated at night from a completely seperate database.

[wongsta]

Originally Posted by chip

imdisk may be what you're after

I'm sure many people missed this fine comment.

ImDisk is a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008. It can create virtual hard disk, floppy or CD/DVD drives using image files or system memory.

Imdisk download page (this software is FREE)

[Luke212]

i once designed a RAM SAN. the SAN comprised two complete units. so it was a low risk ram drive. very fun, but latency too high compared to local bus (i dont like sans )

[magao]

I've been using DataRAM Personal Use RAMDisk since I upgraded to Win7 64-bit - it's one of the few no-cost (up to 4GB) options that works (i.e. doesn't bluescreen, etc).

As a developer, my primary use is to put intermediate build artifacts on there (and turn off virus scanning of those directories) - can easily reduce build times to 50% (and often better). I also store my temporary files there. I just have it configured with a 1GB RAMDisk (8GB RAM).

Rather than load an image I run a batch file at startup which forces it to be the Z: drive, converts it to compressed NTFS and creates the directories I want. The big advantage of this over an image is that if I need another directory created, I just modify the batch file, rather than having to empty everything out of the ramdisk, create everything I want, save ...

[dirtyd]

I did a little bit of RAM disk testing a few years ago in this article and saw some noticeable gains.

[gaspah]

i LOVE ramdisks.. I use SuperSpeed Ramdisk plus.

my pc has 48GB of ram, so when a game comes out that I intend on playing a lot I install it to a folder then copy that folder to a ramdisk, rename the original folder and mount the ramdisk to that original folder location..

load times? ah forget about it... looove ramdisks..

Was disappointed that Max Payne 3 was so big.. but they forced you to wait even if it was loaded anyways.

[spikenet]

I have used http://ramdisk.tekcities.com/RAMDisk/ramdriv.htm for some time, you can use it free for personal use. Works great for pagefile and windows temp, saves me from using my SSD for that stuff. I tried many other ramdisks but this was the only one (at the time) that worked properly.

[fileant]

Unless you have ECC ram then your "ram drive" will not know if the data changes due to an obscure hardware error and so the files may change and be saved back to hard drive wrongly.

For swap files you should use a SSD or spinner for the above reason. + it is pointless, the swap file is used to hold a mapped address space, it is never used really except when a program wants to map memory it has a bigger "map"... but the contents of the "map" will almost always be moved to RAM.. except the bits windows knows it will never care about much). So all you are doing is wasting 4g or whatever on crap data, which could be used by windows to cache (oh, and your "Map" will be again limited by RAM.. the whole point of using the disk).

For many you will hit a 4Gig limit even when it says more, and as pointed out in previous posts (issa2006 and LostBenji) past something like 1G it becomes annoying for some of us to wait the extra time for it to load during boot.

eBoostr is pretty awesome, but benefit becomes unnoticeable with SSD except in benchmarks. p.s. you need to set eboostr for slightly less than 4G or weird stuff happens in windows 7 (eboosr disables itself on reboot sometimes and unmaps the image). You only need 3 or 3.5G of eboostr anyway.

I looked into RAM drive software types as well because I wanted to map certain files (C:\*tmp and the temp folders) to a small ramdrive with fallback to disk... but I could not find one. There was something for windows 95 that could do the temp folders with RAM+Drive, but it was never developed for NT. (and I remember it was fun, but dodgy feeling.. I forget the name of it??).

[issa2006]

newest eboostr 4.5 fixes that problem, if pc does not shut down properly, on next reboot it restart it self in 10 min(if you don't do it manually)

eboostr make a big difference to all media(if using fast ram) as storage for it.

ram has faster access than ssd even in raid, unlimited reads/writes/ and lots multi i/o access (it kicks but over ssd)

date is loaded from c when eboostr loads, update, id corruption occurs no data on cached files are lost.


rammdrive has it uses like with eboostr+ putting temp files on it helps keep ssd live longer..

1. eboostr faster than storage media like ssd+ hdds, ie raid ssd get 900mb/sec, ram as storage+ cache is 3000-7000+ mb/sec

2. eboostr helps reduce the reads + writes to a hdd/ssd

3. prefetch data (recommended to turn of superfetch) in win 7.

4. eboostr can use ram + ramdrive+ ssd to help speed up load files.

5. if eboostr fails/ no data cuption happens to origional files, unlike ssd caching from intel z68+ dataplex software cache

works on all storage + raid

cons.

ebootr pro 4.5
- limit to 4g main memory cache(ways around that- ie ram drive)
- you can use cache space on c(physical drive) as cache. (bypass if using raid on intel raid(you need 2 physical storage + 2 volumns)

- you can tell it what cache storage to cache what drive(it uses all cache storage as 1 cache)


ie, i have 4g main ram as cache+ primo ram drive y: 8g as cache + 20g ssd in raid 0 as cache+4g i-ram box as cache(z

data cache on main memory(4g)+ primo ram drive(8g) get 2600mb/sec avg read
data cache on ssd in raid 0 (20g) get 900mb/sec
data cache on on gigabyte i-ram box (4g) get 130mb/sec

i would like it to say ssd cache only caches hdd+ ram etc caches ssd+hdd , but i can

now my c gets 900mb/sec + my 2tb hdd get 90mb/sec avg
If the gigabyte i-ram cache data on my c: drive my acess is slowed down
+ if the ssd cache cached the c: its the same speed.

- with the ram drive, it has 2 uses.
1 use it to cache files
2 use it for heavy file access use (swap+temp+etc.)

with ssd best to disable pagefile on it+ move all temps locations(windows+winzip/rar+ internet browsers etc) + disable lst access time stamp+ prefetch(not disk cache) just file prefetching+ search index etc.+. log files anything that reads + write to many times...+ hybernation etc

you can put it on a ram drive or on a a hdd

[gaspah]

ImDisk is a virtual disk driver for Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008. It can create virtual hard disk, floppy or CD/DVD drives using image files or system memory.

Imdisk download page (this software is FREE)

Just downloaded this program yesterday and have been using it instead of SuperSpeed Ramdisk Plus. Functionally SuperSpeed is superior, but it has a heap of headaches getting it to work. I'll be using ImDisk from now on for sure. SuperSpeed's drivers has irrecoverably bricked my Windows install on a number of occasions.

ImDisk does have its disadvantages over SuperSpeed, such as it doesn't automatically save and reload your ramdisk settings when you reboot, which is the only major issue I have with the software. SuperSpeed will dump all the info on your ramdisk into an image when you shutdown and when you start back up it loads it all back up and its like you never left. This can be kinda remedied with batch files on startup but it still doesn't save automatically when you shutdown.

This leads me to bug I've found using the software, if you load a pre-existing image into virtual memory it doesn't let you save it back to the image for some reason. You click save or when it prompts you to save on dismounting and nothing happens. You can save if you've just created the image but seems to glitch when you've loaded the image. It also seems to work if you load an image like mounting an ISO file. Oh well. This does make it somewhat troublesome if you're mounting a 'working' folder into a ramdisk.

The other advantage of SuperSpeed, but one which I've totally overcome is the ramdisk behaves like any other hard drive in the Disk Management console. It allows you to mount it to a folder not just a drive. This is very easily overcome with Junction points.

The cmd line tool is very useful indeed, I've started setting up batch files to mount my games for when I want to play them. This is an example with Fallout New Vegas.

@echo off
echo Mounting "Fallout New Vegas" as a RamDisk to V: and creating Junction Point
echo C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Steamapps\common\Fallout New Vegas
imdisk -D -m V:
start /wait imdisk -a -t vm -f Y:\000\GAMES\_RAMDISKS\FalloutNV.img -m V:
junction -d "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Fallout New Vegas"
junction -s "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Fallout New Vegas" "V:\Fallout New Vegas"
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Fallout New Vegas\FalloutNVLauncher.exe"

ImDisk is a fantastic program all in all, its a tiny install, it unitrusive and has a lot of features. I'm gonna permanently scrap SuperSpeed in favour of it.

Thanks for the recommend. I've been scratching my head looking for a decent ramdisk program that can mount images larger than 4GB. Every other damn ramdisk program (and I've tried to use an absolute buttload) just gives you 4GB which is completely useless for my purposes.

[issa2006]

primo ramdisk ult.. you can turn off the ability to save ram drive at shutdown, so only it load,


it can also use a compensation of ram+ hdd space for ram drive(image), to it adjust ram use sage when low on ram.

you can delay the load, so windows load faster.

[gaspah]

Originally Posted by issa2006

primo ramdisk ult.. you can turn off the ability to save ram drive at shutdown, so only it load,


it can also use a compensation of ram+ hdd space for ram drive(image), to it adjust ram use sage when low on ram.

you can delay the load, so windows load faster.

I just installed that one... I'm 100% certain I had already installed one by Romex and it didn't do what I needed. However, one quick look at this one and it seems excellent.. Looks like I'll end up scrapping the work I just did to get the other one to work..

thanks heaps for that. it seems great so far.

EDIT: Oh yeah! This is lush! Does everything perfect. It can do large capacity ramdisks, it saves on shutdown and loads on startup, can be mounted to NTFS folders (managed like a regular hard drive volume), seems to work flawlessly, has a bunch of advanced features that I'm sure are useful. This is definitely THE ramdisk program. Brilliant! Totally thrilled with this! Thanking you very very much