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RAMDisk Benefits?

M

Mez

n00b
Joined
Mar 2, 2010
Messages
19
I was wondering if anyone could elaborate on the benefits and drawbacks of using a RAMDisk to store TEMP, pagefile, etc. (heavy write folders) instead of housing them on the SSD.

Understandably any information stored on the RAMDisk would be wiped when the computer shuts down... how does this translate to daily gaming/media/browsing use?

This definitely seems like the way to go to prevent wear and tear on the SSD, why isn't it more popular?

A brief description of the setup process + OS install (Win7) would also be appreciated, or a link to a good How-To guide for sure.
 
This definitely seems like the way to go to prevent wear and tear on the SSD, why isn't it more popular?
Click to expand...

The cache generally already takes care of some of this although it does not usually let you shoot yourself in the foot. I mean let dirty data linger in the write cache for hours increasing the chances it will be lost. I wish it was more configurable.

One other issue with ramdisks is you never have enough ram to make this work the way you want. Even a 4GB ram disk to me is way too small a place to put all the stuff I would want in the ram disk. It certainly would not be enough for my temp folder. Although that would be a good way of limiting the expansion of that and rebooting would clean the system..
 
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pagefile
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I would hope the system would prevent that. No good point in storing a pagefile in RAM.


Also what I do in most of these cases is use a regular hard drive for these instead of the SSD but I guess that reduces performance.
 
Some of the smallest files I write are cached from Firefox or IE. It would nice to point the temporary browsing files to a ram disk. It would also be nice to cache in ram all the event logs in Windows then write them once on shutdown, but I know that won't be possible. You need instantaneous logging in case of a crash. :(
 
The main drawback is cost. Even though RAM prices have fluctuated a bit lately, you have to admit that RAM is relatively cheap nowadays (I remember telling my parents that the $150 for an extra 4MB of RAM in their 486 would be well worth it). However, RAM is still very expensive compared to other storage media, even SSD. Compare the cost of an 80GB X25-M to 80GB of DDR2/3.

Another drawback is configuration. RAM is meant to be "working area" for the PC, not general storage space. To make it work, you need to either use RAM disk software (the good ones with nice features cost money) or a hardware RAM disk adapter, like the Gigabyte i-RAM (which essentially turns your sticks of RAM into a standard SATA device). The hardware option is expensive, and the software option can be a bit of a pain (generally being more of a pain as you go with cheaper software). The RAM disk software can't run until your OS is running, so you can't have things that are necessary for booting on the RAM drive. Depending on when apps load things, they might think the drive is missing and "correct" your settings if the app launches before the RAM disk has initialized. If you want to use the RAM drive for valuable data, you need some way to save the files to non-volatile storage when you're done and then copy them back to the RAM drive when you start again.

A number of high-end systems do routinely use RAM disks for things like huge video processing. However, it's just not worth it for most people. You can get more power and better mileage from your car by tweaking its fueling settings every day to match the weather. However, most people wouldn't consider it worth it for the small gains they'd get by doing all that work. Likewise, most people don't want to dick around with moving a bunch of files around every time they start or shut down their computer, just to have a few file operations take a quarter of a second instead of half.

Generally speaking, RAM disks give great performance, but they're not really something for the average Joe right now.
 
Valnar said:
Some of the smallest files I write are cached from Firefox or IE. It would nice to point the temporary browsing files to a ram disk.
Click to expand...

Assuming you have sufficient RAM, you can increase the memory cache and disable the disk cache in Firefox.
 
I use this program. It loads and unloads itself automatically at shutdown and boot. Hassle free runs in the background and you forget all about it.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/f...ks-Utilities-*&p=442160&viewfull=1#post442160

^ Another thing weird I noticed on the newer Firefox is whenever I disabled disk cache it always turned back on all by itself. Not sure what that was about and didn't bother looking more into it. So I just use this now and good to go.
 
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^ just check back and make sure it sticks. Mine kept resetting back to default. So I just installed ramdisk instead.
 
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So that's a 'not worth the hassle' answer there...

Can a pagefile or temp folder be moved (from my SSD to a future 64MB cache 7200rpm HDD, for example ;)) after installation of Win7 to the SSD?

Or would I have to use redirection links...?
 
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One of the main reasons why I push for use of a RAMDisks is when the user is a heavy photoshop user:
Joe Average said:
In other words, as I said, the cost of the devices + the cost of populating them becomes absolutely ridiculous. Grab two Velociraptors and have fun... or even a handful of SSD drives and RAID 'em together. The overall price-to-performance ratio will blow these iRAM devices clear off the planet surface...

Sad, really, because I've been a proponent of actual RAMdisks for decades now. Hell, I used to boot my Amiga 500 off a RAMdisk, so I've seen pretty much every attempt at making such devices as the iRAM that have appeared, and they all suck, period. They just can't do the job adequately and keep the price-to-performance ratio anywhere near a reasonable level.

I built a RAID 0 box for a small image studio 2 weeks ago, a new startup here in Vegas that is making waves. They wanted a "demo" workstation to see what's possible for processing as they don't want to create a massive server-type situation in the office, but 3-4 workstations that are equal in performance and then just using simple file sharing as required. Very simple setup in terms of the network, but the workstation I built used 2 300GB Velociraptors (tried to sell 'em on SSD but the amount of data they're dealing with wouldn't be practical - again, a price-to-performance and ROI issue).

The hard part was getting them to spring for 16GB of RAM because of the cost, but a few weeks ago I saw that sale for 4 4GB sticks of RAM for about $450 and made a few phone calls and snagged a similar deal.

I set up Photoshop CS3 for 'em (their legit retail copy) on Vista Business x64. They started messing around with it, loading some rather large TIFF files in excess of 150MB a pop, several at a time, performing some basic scripted actions on 'em, blurs, filters, etc. Using the Velociraptors in RAID 0 meant very snappy and consistent performance, as well as having 16GB of RAM too. Also, it's a Q6600 based machine running rock solid at 3 GHz.

They were very pleased with the performance at that point, but I had a surprise for 'em. ;)

I asked if I could have 20 mins 'alone' with the workstation to "rewire it" as Tim Allen might say. That consisted of grabbing a trial version of SuperSpeed Software's RamDisk Plus 9 and installing it, doing the simple configuration, and then creating a 10GB RAMdisk and told Photoshop "Ok, you want a scratch disk? Here, try this on for size."

After I did some tests of my own using the same scripts they'd done earlier, boy... I tell ya. You haven't lived till you see 225MB TIFF files literally snap onscreen in the blink of an eye, multiple huge TIFFs with resolutions like 5000x5000 and even higher. That's what's possible with RAMdisks, because even Velociraptors in RAID 0 pumping out something like 280MB/s sustained pales to the close to 5GB a second in bandwidth of that RAMdisk.

I told 'em to come back in and rerun their test scripts.

Jaws hit the floor, folks. Well, not quite but figuratively speaking, at least.

They asked what I'd done, I told them I put the scratch disk in RAM where it should be if you have the RAM to make it happen, and they bought 4 licenses of RamDisk Plus 10 mins later, and I got a signed contract to construct 3 more workstations identical to that one top to bottom and also be their "geek" if any issues come up.

It was a very good week... ;)
Click to expand...
 
Mez said:
So that's a 'not worth the hassle' answer there...

Can a pagefile or temp folder be moved (from my SSD to a future 64MB cache 720rpm HDD, for example ;)) after installation of Win7 to the SSD?

Or would I have to use redirection links...?
Click to expand...

yep. both are in system properties under advanced tab
 
rive22 said:
^ just check back and make sure it sticks. Mine kept resetting back to default. So I just installed ramdisk instead.
Click to expand...

I never bothered to look for this setting before. I can't find it in Firefox.
 
Mez said:
So that's a 'not worth the hassle' answer there...

Can a pagefile or temp folder be moved (from my SSD to a future 64MB cache 7200rpm HDD, for example ;)) after installation of Win7 to the SSD?

Or would I have to use redirection links...?
Click to expand...

The pagefile should stay on the SSD, as its accesses match up pretty much perfectly with SSD's strong points. If you have a decent system, you should have enough RAM that it won't page out that much. You can reduce the size of the pagefile, but it's best to keep it on the SSD for fast access. If you're hitting the pagefile a lot, you don't have enough RAM, and it'd be a better investment to get more. Likewise, small temp files are probably also going to be well-suited for SSDs.

You can save some write cycles on your SSD by moving stuff off, but you're also hurting performance (possibly in the areas with some of the most improvement from SSD). Intel has stated that their drives can handle 100GB of writes per day for 5 years straight. In their internal testing, most users were writing 2-3GB per day, with the heaviest user well under 20GB. Personally, I'm averaging a little over 5GB. So if you can manage to do 10x the writes of Intel's heaviest user, every day, you might cut the life of your drive down to 3 years. For reference, 1TB drives were just getting ready to be launched 3 years ago. Not quite 5 years ago, Seagate was launching the 7200.8 line with a 400GB model for $330. Even if you manage to kill the drive in three years, it probably won't even be worth $50 by then.

Sure, you can make a car last for 100 years if you never drive it. But what's the point of having a car you can't drive? Is your SSD a collectible that you keep in a museum, or a part you bought to make your current PC faster?


Valnar said:
I never bothered to look for this setting before. I can't find it in Firefox.
Click to expand...

Type about:config into the address bar and filter for "browser.cache".

Here are the four values you want to look at. Capacity is listed in KB.
browser.cache.disk.enable
browser.cache.disk.capacity
browser.cache.memory.enable
browser.cache.memory.capacity
 
Pagefiles are not used unless the system is low on memory; an unused pagefile has no performance influence and thus you can put your swap file on a floppy drive for all i care.
If you have enough RAM, just disable it. No need to use mass-storage as RAM; it was an emergency solution when RAM capacity was too low. Nowadays we don't have these problems.

A RAMdisk is useless in my opinion. Why would you want that RAM as slow disk interface instead of real RAM? Real RAM works much better and is more flexible.
 
sub.mesa said:
A RAMdisk is useless in my opinion. Why would you want that RAM as slow disk interface instead of real RAM? Real RAM works much better and is more flexible.
Click to expand...

You are assuming that Windows is a perfect operating system and it would never, ever, ever need a pagefile if you have enough RAM. :D

Well, maybe Windows is, but some applications aren't. I know that Photoshop used to require you to specify a page file.

I won't argue that RAM disks used to be a crutch, but it may still be a necessary one.
 
32-bit apps are limited to 2GiB anyway or 3GiB when specially compiled, whether you are on 32-bit Windows or 64-bit Windows. So again, unless you have a special exotic setup, you don't really need a pagefile when using Windows 7 with enough RAM like 4GB+.

As for your Photoshop argument; may be true but aren't you confused with Photoshop being able to set a different HDD as scratch disk?
I believe tomshardware had an article about disabling pagefile, and found no big problems doing heavy tasks, unless with very low RAM sizes.
 
The reason I went for the 160GB SSD is that I was looking for a single-drive solution in which I wouldn't have to move pieces of my OS all over the place. So it sounds as if leaving pagefile alone on the SSD shouldn't affect real world performance anytime soon.

Excellent replies, thanks.
 
sub.mesa said:
A RAMdisk is useless in my opinion. Why would you want that RAM as slow disk interface instead of real RAM? Real RAM works much better and is more flexible.
Click to expand...



That's what you call slow? :confused:
 
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You know I gotta say, I dropped this ramdrive in just recently and after a few days I can definitely tell and feel the difference in my web browsing experience. Everything is seamlessly instant as if clicking through folders on a drive. Even though we're talking milliseconds, it's noticeable!! Especially when that cache starts filling up :D

Where I'm really noticing it is places like youtube, ebay, sites with loads of images/videos & people's ridiculously huge myspace pages.
 
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rive22 said:


That's what you call slow? :confused:
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Actually, i thought you guys were discussing Gigabyte iRAM related products; RAMdrives with SATA interface.

But still, if you got RAM, why want to simulate a disk with that? Sure its gonna be a fast disk, but its gonna be slower RAM. If you have RAM, your OS should use it intelligently, not you having to simulate a disk.

And simulating a disk and then storing the pagefile in there is beyond comprehension for me - why would you want a pagefile with lots of RAM, why want to store it in RAM; you just waste your RAM space.
 
I eluded to it above, but it bears mention again. Not every program uses (Windows) memory effectively. Not every program leaves it up to the operating system to control memory usage. Cache files for web browers are a good example. Yes, you can go into each application you are concerned about see if there is a way to turn off disk caches and just use memory, but what if the application doesn't give you that option?

For people with more RAM and money than they know what to do with, a RAM disk is fine.
 
Linux operating systems use tmpfs, so any temporary space an application needs; its gonna be a RAMdisk instead, but then without all the overhead of a normal I/O -> RAM interface (like the md driver). So tmpfs works with any application, and when its writing or reading from temporary files, its doing that in RAM-space so very fast.

Of course, that wouldn't help Windows users. The disk cache of Firefox is also to save your tabs when it crashes for example, that does not work with a true RAM drive as its gone with a OS crash. So i'm not sure if this really benefits Windows users all that much.

Enough RAM is something that doesn't exist, only when your RAM is larger than your HDD can you say that, i think. I've been wanting to expand RAM on my fileserver for example, beyond the 8GB it has now. That space is full very easily and 16GB wouldnt be enough to do proper caching. 32GB or larger; we start to talk. But that's very expensive and i opted using SSDs as cache device instead, for my storage setup.
 
sub.mesa said:
Actually, i thought you guys were discussing Gigabyte iRAM related products; RAMdrives with SATA interface.

But still, if you got RAM, why want to simulate a disk with that? Sure its gonna be a fast disk, but its gonna be slower RAM. If you have RAM, your OS should use it intelligently, not you having to simulate a disk.

And simulating a disk and then storing the pagefile in there is beyond comprehension for me - why would you want a pagefile with lots of RAM, why want to store it in RAM; you just waste your RAM space.
Click to expand...

If this is beyond comprehension for you...you need to stop posting since you will never be able to comprehend it. Why is it you are arguing with "this is what I think" instead of hard factual data? The OS and programs that work within it will never be perfect. The RAM disk is a proven solution which helps bypass/mitigate these imperfections by creating a clear and direct path which helps tailor the OS to a program's needs.
 
Instead of just insulting me, Trepidati0n, you may have offered some 'hard factual data' yourself.

With modern systems, the pagefile isn't actually actively used. If you use that in your RAM; you waste about half your RAM size. This would cause RAM shorage so the system starts to swap, so you start moving data from your "real" RAM to your pagefile stored in RAM; its senseless and ridiculous. If any benefit is possible this way, i'm sure there's a better way to it. With this method you just force your system to swap as you lose a large portion of your RAM. I think it creates more problems than it solves.

The whole idea of swapping is about using the disk as emergency fall-back memory solution, in case RAM was full. That idea evolved a bit, but it stayed some 'last effort' emergency solution that nobody likes.
 
Don't forget that the pagefile is also useful for saving crash dumps if/when things go badly. Not that they are all that useful, but I was running my system with a small SSD (60G) and large memory (24G) without a pagefile last fall. It started crashing and I was not able to get enough info to diagnose the failure, which turned out to be a failing RAID card, until I turned the pagefile back on so that the failure events could make it into the logs.

Don't disable the pagefile or run it to RAMdisk. Go ahead and make it really, really small - but disabling it is not a good idea.
 
Point well taken, but doesn't Windows allow mini-dumps? And doesn't disabling the automatic reboot on BSOD give you a clear pointer to diagnose forward, without needing any dumpfile? I'm not all that familiar with Windows, though.
 
sub.mesa said:
And simulating a disk and then storing the pagefile in there is beyond comprehension for me - why would you want a pagefile with lots of RAM, why want to store it in RAM; you just waste your RAM space.
Click to expand...

Yes, putting a pagefile on a (software) RAM disk is using RAM to emulate disk to emulate RAM. It's a lot of overhead to end up right back where you started. Unless you've got some poorly written app that must use the pagefile, you're probably hurting yourself by doing this.


Valnar said:
I eluded to it above, but it bears mention again. Not every program uses (Windows) memory effectively. Not every program leaves it up to the operating system to control memory usage. Cache files for web browers are a good example. Yes, you can go into each application you are concerned about see if there is a way to turn off disk caches and just use memory, but what if the application doesn't give you that option?

For people with more RAM and money than they know what to do with, a RAM disk is fine.
Click to expand...

Yes, for other uses where you can't simply tell the app to use RAM instead of disk, a RAM disk is great. It relieves the biggest bottleneck of a modern PC.


You're both right, you're just talking about different things.
 
sub.mesa said:
Of course, that wouldn't help Windows users. The disk cache of Firefox is also to save your tabs when it crashes for example, that does not work with a true RAM drive as its gone with a OS crash. So i'm not sure if this really benefits Windows users all that much.
Click to expand...

I've run my os to crash a few times while fine tuning the voltages of an overclock and the program above has so far been loyal. Each time it's saved my exact firefox state (last windows open and everything) and when I came back into windows it was restored as if nothing happened.

One program that has always grabbed my attention was Superspeed's SuperVolume. http://www.superspeed.com/servers/supervolume.php
I tell you, the day will come when I am able to do this to my os/apps drive and that will be so sweet. :D
 
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I've increased my RamDrive to 1GB and directed my system temp folders to it.

I loaded up some intensive database file comparison programs that took over 12 hours to sort on a Samsung F3 last night. I tested this on the RamDrive this morning and it took under 120 seconds.

This is logical of course but the trick was that I hadn't thought about before was I enabled file compression on the RamDrive. So basically a 1GB drive is like a 3-6GB+ drive for handling data. I'm extremely happy and pleased upon discovering this, and of course the results.

Just some more info for anyone that browses this thread :)
 
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Also - while not as popular as the superspeed product there is another one which I use. The guy is good to deal with and has always been helpful if I even have any questions. The one he makes does work perfectly and I've been using it for several years.

http://members.fortunecity.com/ramdisk/RAMDisk/ramdriv002.htm

I'm in no way associated with Christiaan, just a customer and I like supporting the little guys.
 
Sounds promising rive22!
Mind if I bug with you questions about setup/usage once I get to that point?

Was also wondering what happens if the system temp folder on the RAMDisk becomes full? Does it automatically write over data?

Also, rive22, you chose a 1GB RAMDisk (Awesome that compression works here!) what sort of programs do you run frequently? Just trying to compare usage in case I might benefit from a larger temp...

What is the default Windows temp folder size? Unlimited? Or does it stop and write over data at some point? I've seen some temp folders become pretty bloated so I'm thinking Windows doesn't care what size Temp is.
 
SHM in Linux already caches the bejesus out of everything that it can. You can preload stuff into SHM as well.

Don't know if TurboBoost in Vista/7 can be preloaded but it works a similar way.

I have 8GB of RAM in my desktop.
I was, using sshfs, looking through some photos in a remote location. Nautilus in GNOME was generating thumbnails. The previewer app was pulling up whole photos. The directory had about 300MB in it.
I got tired of waiting and decided I would just copy/paste locally and wait for it to finish before perusing.
I copy/pasted and it spit out the first 100MB in ONE SECOND before dropping down to 200KB/sec (the upload speed of the remote system).
SHM had cached all of those files in RAM automagically.

So, there's nothing a RAMDISK can do that SHM can't, and SHM will magically adapt to your level of memory usage.

If you're doing something really write-heavy you can always steal space in SHM, too. No need to purposefully procure a RAMDISK.

(This is also, as far as I have been informed, one of the reasons why WoW loads quickly on Linux+WINE vs Windows)
 
What this SHM you talk of? You mean filecache?

The way you explained works on any modern OS, not just Linux. Windows does that too. If you have 8GB RAM, and you boot up, your RAM usage is - say - 1GB. If you then read a 2GB large file, the total RAM used will be 3GB. Once you start reading (or writing) files, its kept in RAM still, until the free space runs out, then filecache is dumped; simply freed to clear up space for new memory operations. I'm not sure how Windows behaves with foreign filesystems, things like an FTP client aren't automatically cached, as that's only network I/O to the OS.

I'm a user of Wine+WoW on Ubuntu, and howmuch i like Ubuntu, i can't say it boots significantly faster than Win7+WoW; while i was still using my initial setup with local HDDs. Both Windows and Linux should do an excellent job at filecache. It gets different when we look at buffering:

Technically, when you write, you don't have to do that immediately. You can buffer them, meaning you say its written to the application, but you keep it in RAM instead before actually committing to disk. Due to filesystem safety, buffering can be dangerous and has to be done properly, in a transaction-like system. That's what the write barriers in Ext4 on Linux are for.

Windows, however, does not buffer as aggressively. If you copy a directory with lots of small files to the same physical harddrive, the best thing you can do is first read all data, then write it. Not reading file1, writing file 1. Windows does some buffering, but ideally if you have 4GB of free RAM, you want to be able to buffer close to 4GB - essentially the first 4GB you write go at memory speeds like 3500MB/s. After that you would drop to the speed level the physical drive is giving you.

So, writes can be handled much more intelligently. Reads are harder; all you can do is pre-fetch and cache. That's not as effective as buffering can be.
 
sub.mesa said:
What this SHM you talk of? You mean filecache?
Click to expand...
SHM is the Shared Memory facility of Linux

The way you explained works on any modern OS, not just Linux. Windows does that too.
Click to expand...
XP did not

If you have 8GB RAM, and you boot up, your RAM usage is - say - 1GB. If you then read a 2GB large file, the total RAM used will be 3GB. Once you start reading (or writing) files, its kept in RAM still, until the free space runs out, then filecache is dumped; simply freed to clear up space for new memory operations.
Click to expand...
As I said, Vista and 7 behave this way.

I'm a user of Wine+WoW on Ubuntu, and howmuch i like Ubuntu, i can't say it boots significantly faster than Win7+WoW; while i was still using my initial setup with local HDDs. Both Windows and Linux should do an excellent job at filecache. It gets different when we look at buffering:
Click to expand...
WoW + WINE was always faster than WoW + Vista and WoW + XP.
WoW + 7 may be better, who knows.
 
Hey Mez Yeah no problem of course ask questions anytime

For now I'm experimenting so I haven't really set a dedicated size yet.

I bumped mine to 1.5GB to dabble some more. The main apps I run besides the everyday 60ish non-demanding things in the background are Photoshop, Audition, Sonar, Ultra Compare Pro, & some other intensive data processing apps. Mainly media and data processing apps, and archiving.

Lately I have been playing with AVS video, and Sun VirtualBox. Just to explore some more I installed an xp virtual sandbox entirely in a RamDrive and running the whole thing is so smooth, seamless, & outrageously fast. Now that higher amounts of ram are becoming more common place, the uses of RamDrives are looking a lot more appealing & attainable. If I personally were to come to run virtual machines often that one use alone would be enough to push me into moving to X58 and getting as much ram as I could afford just so I could have the largest/fastest RamDrives I could get my hands on.

So as I'm learning there are a lot of benefits to a RamDrive besides using one as a cache.

I'm pretty sure the system temp files folder would be unlimited and usually it clears most useless stuff out after either the programs close, a day, or a reboot depending on what was in there. You can go to the gadgets page and get awesome ones to monitor everything like drive, network, cpu, memory monitors etc if ya haven't got those already ;)

For now I'm not sure on what size I would need, since I only have 4GB I'm going to use as little as possible. I haven't run any of my other apps yet to gather their needs, but my data apps are requiring a good 1GB compressed even after breaking the files down so my system could accommodate, so I'll be getting another 4GB very soon :). If you have a lot more ram and come to find the apps you run benefit from a larger drive go for it :D The easiest thing you can do is move the temp folder to a ram drive, grab one of those gadgets that monitors the drive and see how much it fills up when running certain apps, etc.
 
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