Win7 64bit Ram Drive?

[forcemac101]

Alrighty...thinking about dropping in another 8GB to give me a round 16GB of Ram...figure I allocate anwhere from 4-8GB for a ram drive to put my swap file....problem is it seems like Ram Drive software is hard to find....anyone have some good success stories??

 

[Sir_Poop_Alot]

I use this

 

[forcemac101]

I just found that...playing with it right now. Did you opt to purchase or are you using the 4GB limited one?

 

[PigLover]

There's not really a lot of benefit to using a ram drive for your swap space on win7. You get the desired effect a lot easier by just adding the ram and configuring the machine to not swap (set your swap file size to 0). With the RAM drive approach you actually get less available RAM for swapping since win7 has to manage the active RAM in the system and the duplicate copy that it thinks is on a disk but really lives in a section of your RAM.

The only downside is that without a swap file win7 doesn't have anywhere to manage a core dump in the case of a BSOD. But to me this is a big don't care - when was the last time you or anyone you know actually did a crash analysis on a windows machine? Besides, if it doesn't waste time doing the memory dump you'd recover from the BSOD faster.

 

[Jon55]

There's not really a lot of benefit to using a ram drive for your swap space on win7. You get the desired effect a lot easier by just adding the ram and configuring the machine to not swap (set your swap file size to 0). With the RAM drive approach you actually get less available RAM for swapping since win7 has to manage the active RAM in the system and the duplicate copy that it thinks is on a disk but really lives in a section of your RAM.

The only downside is that without a swap file win7 doesn't have anywhere to manage a core dump in the case of a BSOD. But to me this is a big don't care - when was the last time you or anyone you know actually did a crash analysis on a windows machine? Besides, if it doesn't waste time doing the memory dump you'd recover from the BSOD faster.

But don't some programs look for a page file and, if one is not found, could potentially run incorrectly?

 

[PigLover]

But don't some programs look for a page file and, if one is not found, could potentially run incorrectly?

Nope. Applications don't know anything about the page file at all. Only Windows does.

 

[Joe Average]

Nope. Applications don't know anything about the page file at all. Only Windows does.

Let me see you run Photoshop CS5 (or any version of Photoshop, all the way back to PS5) with absolutely no page file at all, "disabled" in the Advanced System options, and get back to us, thanks.

 

[PigLover]

Let me see you run Photoshop CS5 (or any version of Photoshop, all the way back to PS5) with absolutely no page file at all, "disabled" in the Advanced System options, and get back to us, thanks.

Do it almost every day...on a machine with 24Gb of real memory. It runs pretty darn sweet when it never - ever - has to swap to disk. BTW, I run Adobe Premier Pro CS5 too, which is just a bit more demanding that the photo editor subsystem. Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[Yoda4561]

I've been doing lots of playing around with ramdrives and swap/temp/cache locations to see what works. forget putting the pagefile on one, it's not what's getting hammered and slowing your drives down for the most part. I'm still not 100% sure what is, but it's not the windows swap file. There's this wierd issue in vista64 where superfetch will try and prefetch things it REALLY shouldn't be prefetching (like my 4GB ramdisk.img file) , and it won't give priority access to applications that actually need it while it's prefetching.

Moving the browser cache to the ramdrive, as well as the windows temp directories seems to work just fine. The windows thumbnail cache is another one, but I don't know of any way to move it off of C: . There's a ton of stuff that you just can't move into the ramdrive, like the windows SXS stuff with all the dll's, and various internal caches like the thumbnail cache and others I don't know about. So a ramdrive won't replace an ssd.

I think the best option right now if you have 8+ gigs of ram, is to set aside 1 GB for the windows Temp directories and your browser cache, and maybe hardlink some game save folders to it since it should help the pauses caused by checkpoints and autosaves (haven't experimented with this yet, still trying to get a better understanding of hardlinking via the command line). These seem to be the folders that get the most writes on any given day on my computer, and the data isn't really that important, moving them to a small ramdrive would be beneficial. Any more is really a waste of available ram, and saving the ramdisk img's takes longer.

edit: I should emphasize, I noticed zero performance benefit to moving the swapfile to a Ramdrive, and when I tried that it was the SuperSpeed Ramdisk that advertises that you can use it for the windows swap partition without issue. I did notice the lack of ram via increased disk activity and OS unrepsonsiveness due to having to re-superfetch things. Moving the resource (especially fonts) folders for GIMP to the ramdrive however makes it super fast, I don't use it much these days since I found Paint.Net, but for batch renames and conversions it's nice to not have to go make a sammich waiting for it to load everything.