20GB Ram Disk - I7-3930K Quad Channel

tangoseal

[H]F Junkie
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Dec 18, 2010
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Since we all measure real performance in IOPS I wanted to share something that made me gasp for air.

This is just f'ing rediculous bandwidth on quad channel DDR3 1600. System in sig below.

5+ Million IOPS - This is just ridiculous. I am going to be testing various conditions in which I will make use of this RAM disk. I am also going to install a full copy of battlefield 3 on here and see how it performs etc.. Probably not any more noticeable than an SSD.

ramdisk
 
That's amazing really. I shudder to think. If you had 64GB of ram and a 32 or 48GB RAM drive you could do many wonderful things. World domination could be in your hands. You could probably cure AIDS, but instead you're putting BF3 on it. At least you could toss Skyrim on there.
 
Heh, that's a beefy system to say the least... Hope you plan to fold with it. ;)
 
That's amazing really. I shudder to think. If you had 64GB of ram and a 32 or 48GB RAM drive you could do many wonderful things. World domination could be in your hands. You could probably cure AIDS, but instead you're putting BF3 on it. At least you could toss Skyrim on there.

I never put BF3 on there. That was a joke. Skyrim is a horrible waste of storage space. Honestly past a good 6gbps SSD games dont load much faster. Well I will do a lot of testing. The only reason I have 32GB of ram is due to having a large amount of mem laying around my office. For a gamer you dont need but 8g max. For someone like me, well I am going to put all 32 to use.

Heh, that's a beefy system to say the least... Hope you plan to fold with it. ;)

Fold I will!!! Its going to happen as soon as I get my Raystorm waterblock on there. Waiting on a corrected backplate solution from XSPC first.
 
very nice, I did this once with my 920 :D only had 12GB though so I made a 4GB ramdisk to mess around with. Pretty damn fast.
 
tangoseal, you should post in the "Memory" forum as to the justification of having a crap load of RAM.
 
Thing is 8GB unbuffered DIMM's are getting "more" cost effective which makes larger drives possible. I also tried this a bit with WMC7 and thumbs and stuff load like lightning. Quite amazing.
 
tangoseal, you should post in the "Memory" forum as to the justification of having a crap load of RAM.

I'm not trying to justify anything. Also a RAM disk is a form.of data storage system. It's seen as a physical hd even though it is logical in nature. You can install anything you want on a RAM disk. I'm 95% sure this is a fitting forum given the mission and purpose of a RAM disk. I'm not discussing if 1333 is better than 1600. I'm discussing the speed of a RAM disk on quad channel memory bus.
 
I'm not trying to justify anything. Also a RAM disk is a form.of data storage system. It's seen as a physical hd even though it is logical in nature. You can install anything you want on a RAM disk. I'm 95% sure this is a fitting forum given the mission and purpose of a RAM disk. I'm not discussing if 1333 is better than 1600. I'm discussing the speed of a RAM disk on quad channel memory bus.

eh, I think you're reading too far into what he's saying. typically when you enter the memory section of any forum, they always spout off you don't need more than x gb of ram, usually 4 but now people are stating to accept 8. they'll always claim you'll never use that much, waste of money, etc.

those people are just jelly. if someone tells you that you have too much ram, just insist that they are jelly.
 
I'm not trying to justify anything. Also a RAM disk is a form.of data storage system. It's seen as a physical hd even though it is logical in nature. You can install anything you want on a RAM disk. I'm 95% sure this is a fitting forum given the mission and purpose of a RAM disk. I'm not discussing if 1333 is better than 1600. I'm discussing the speed of a RAM disk on quad channel memory bus.

Actually I didn't phrase that right, sorry.

Should of been reason since DD3 RAM is dirt cheap they can do a RAM drive.
 
typically when you enter the memory section of any forum, they always spout off you don't need more than x gb of ram, usually 4 but now people are stating to accept 8. they'll always claim you'll never use that much, waste of money, etc.

those people are just jelly. if someone tells you that you have too much ram, just insist that they are jelly.

^this :)
 
The chrome browser on my primary desktop juggles around 300-500 open tabs at any given time. I actually switched over to chrome because firefox used to choke once you hit 200-300 tabs.

I'm also not really a fan of exiting applications that I use on a routine basis -- I like them to be an alt-tab away. Based on my computing habits I would say go for 8gb minimum, 12gb recommended, and 16gb best.

The guys in the memory forums recommending 4gb must have a usage pattern consisting of facebook, hotmail, and minesweeper.
 
Cheap as it is right now, I really dunno why anyone would have less than 8GB.
 
Actually I didn't phrase that right, sorry.

Should of been reason since DD3 RAM is dirt cheap they can do a RAM drive.

Yeah keep telling your self that.

I had to expense $640 for a processor and $490 for a motherboard after taxes and shipping just to get that really cheap ass 32GB of ram lol.

Think before you spout your lack of forethought calling this a hobby anyone can afford.
 
That's amazing really. I shudder to think. If you had 64GB of ram and a 32 or 48GB RAM drive you could do many wonderful things. World domination could be in your hands. You could probably cure AIDS, but instead you're putting BF3 on it. At least you could toss Skyrim on there.

I tested Skyrim on a 7GB ram drive on my x58 system, didn't load anything any faster, switching cells was about the same time etc. Was pretty disappointing. I can't imagine what's going on, skyrim must just have wait loops or something so you read the load screen hints.
 
I tested Skyrim on a 7GB ram drive on my x58 system, didn't load anything any faster, switching cells was about the same time etc. Was pretty disappointing. I can't imagine what's going on, skyrim must just have wait loops or something so you read the load screen hints.

It could simply be a limitation of the program/game itself.
It doesn't look like you are CPU limited at all, therefore either the OS or the app is at fault, as you said, with either wait times coded in, or just code which hasn't been adjusted for that kind of speed output.
 
Game loading isn't necessity disk bound, it could be bottlenecked by how fast the GPU/CPU can unpack textures etc. WeDepends on the game really...
 
The chrome browser on my primary desktop juggles around 300-500 open tabs at any given time. I actually switched over to chrome because firefox used to choke once you hit 200-300 tabs.

I'm also not really a fan of exiting applications that I use on a routine basis -- I like them to be an alt-tab away. Based on my computing habits I would say go for 8gb minimum, 12gb recommended, and 16gb best.

The guys in the memory forums recommending 4gb must have a usage pattern consisting of facebook, hotmail, and minesweeper.

300 tabs?? How can you possibly ever find that one web page that you are looking for? That's what favourites and history are for...
 
Biggest problem I had with ramdisks is that windows prefetching likes to prefetch the on-disk backup file they save and I couldn't figure out a way to exclude that one file from superfetch. Windows wanting to prefetch it after a heavy ram load, like image editing or benchmarking would cause it to thrash the hard drive for what seemed like minutes. This was with a 2-4 gigabyte ramdisk, with a 20 gig one I suggest disabling prefetching or figure out how to keep that backup file from being prefetched.
 

Dataram is limited to 4GB disk with ads. However it is cheap to purchase.

I used a copy of a SuperSpeed desktop/workstation license from my business just to test it, we had an extra one, but I am giving it back because I didnt pay for it. I am going to probably purchase a less costly solution for my box as soon as I am done reviewing some of the ones out there. I want one that doesnt allow windows to perform certain degrading functions due to having a ram drive running. I also am waiting to get my Samsung HD103SJ 1TB spinner back from RMA next week instead of doing massive writes to my SSD's when the system backups and saves the RAM Disk image to my drives during system power down.

Saving a 20GB ram disk image to your SSD every couple of hours or when you shut your box down is sure to rack up the writes on the SSD a lot faster than regular casual OS operations do.
 
Saving a 20GB ram disk image to your SSD every couple of hours or when you shut your box down is sure to rack up the writes on the SSD a lot faster than regular casual OS operations do.

How about rsync between the ramdisk and SSD? In this case only the changed files should be copied. Although that will not help with open files.
 
Sooo... Thread resurrection. Have you ever gotten around to reviewing different RAMDisk software using your Quad channel setup? I am always amazed at how little research and testing has been done in the RAMDisk world. The only semi-comprehensive review group I've ever come across in the couple years I've been playing around with RAMDisks was http://www.raymond.cc/blog/12-ram-disk-software-benchmarked-for-fastest-read-and-write-speed/ but I would love to see someone in a position to do a few side by side comparisons between dual, triple, and quad channel RAMDisks, various freqs, trade off write ups between the different software, etc.
Has anyone else seen any significant research into the subject?
 
How about rsync between the ramdisk and SSD? In this case only the changed files should be copied. Although that will not help with open files.

I have tested this booting into pure ram on linux. It is amazing but I just flipped back to the ssds, I don't want to deal with upkeep.
 
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