RAMdisk ?


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I was thinking about doing something with the RAM I have.

I have 24GB and never use more than 6 or so - and thats with giving 4gb to a VM. Most of the time I just use my desktop for internet and a little gaming.

Is a RAMdisk still something worthwhile ?

With an SSD, is it even necessary ? Everything is near instantaneous already - maybe use it just to install a game on it or something...

I will be building a new system once x79 chipset is out in abundance - but until then I would just like to use some of this RAM for something. With it being so cheap I upgraded from 12GB and now - it just sits there - waiting, calling, taunting me.

I dont really want to spend more money on this computer as it is nearly 2 years old and I will be building a 3960E system after some x79 mobos are out.

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RAMdisk is still way faster than any SSD. However, the problem with using it is you'd probably want stuff to be read from and written back to a persistent storage when power-cycling the computer (Sleep is ok, anything more is not, even Hibernate). So, unless you don't ever power-cycle, RAMdisk is mainly good only for various temporary files, not installations or other data that needs to be preserved.

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I have taken that into consideration - its the speed factor I am not sure about. I know RAM is hella faster than any SSD - but my computer is already crazy fast.

Since it will lose data upon a reboot - a game is out of the question. I dunno - maybe this is not the best idea. I have considered giving 12GB away to a friend - but not if I can find a viable use for it.

I rarely run VM & dont know anything about media editing - so meh

Thanks for your reply.

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So, why did you add all that memory to begin with? Anybody knows that for what you say you do, that is totally absurd!

Wait, I know why. Because you're one of these people that does stuff just because, huh?

Computer is a WHOLE 2 years old!! Man, junk that POS!!

You have more memory in that 1 computer than I have in 9 here, not to mention my newest one is 4 years old!

Give the memory to some one who might know how to use it, or can to use it, and then go waste some more money on another computer.

I could only wish I was in your predicament!!

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So, why did you add all that memory to begin with? Anybody knows that for what you say you do, that is totally absurd!

Wait, I know why. Because you're one of these people that does stuff just because, huh?

Computer is a WHOLE 2 years old!! Man, junk that POS!!

You have more memory in that 1 computer than I have in 9 here, not to mention my newest one is 4 years old!

Give the memory to some one who might know how to use it, or can to use it, and then go waste some more money on another computer.

I could only wish I was in your predicament!!

RAM is cheap right now. That's probably why he has so much.

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thats not really much you can do with that memory, either run more VM's or take it out and distribute it to friends and other machines.

I wouldn't bother with a ram disk, by the time you load everything into the RAM disk from a SSD or HDD you really negate any speed increases with it plus you have the data being lost in the event of a power cut.

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So, why did you add all that memory to begin with? Anybody knows that for what you say you do, that is totally absurd!

Wait, I know why. Because you're one of these people that does stuff just because, huh?

Computer is a WHOLE 2 years old!! Man, junk that POS!!

You have more memory in that 1 computer than I have in 9 here, not to mention my newest one is 4 years old!

Give the memory to some one who might know how to use it, or can to use it, and then go waste some more money on another computer.

I could only wish I was in your predicament!!

Wow - wasnt expecting that kind of response - well Vice is right - RAM is dirt cheap - 12GB Hyper-X T1 for $100 ! Why not ?

If you have 9 computers - newest one is 4 years old ?? are you a hoarder ? one of those people on that Lifetime show ? Please tell me you are only 16 and cant get a good job.....

I guess you dont want to hear my ThinkPad has 8GB RAM and its just used for browsing web & email -- oh I have mint on a VM -

... you probably didnt want to hear that, huh ? :devil:

RAM is cheap right now. That's probably why he has so much.

Exactly

thats not really much you can do with that memory, either run more VM's or take it out and distribute it to friends and other machines.

I wouldn't bother with a ram disk, by the time you load everything into the RAM disk from a SSD or HDD you really negate any speed increases with it plus you have the data being lost in the event of a power cut.

This was exactly the post I was looking for - thank you. You just made my decision for me

There are 2 people who could use 6GB each - thanks !

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Sorry to say but cork is right. Why the hell did you buy that extra 12GB if you didn't even use your existing 12? Sure, it's cheap, but you couldn't have thought of ANYTHING better to spend $100 on than RAM that you don't need? Are your parents so rich that $100 doesn't seem like money to you? If anything it sounds like you're the spoiled 16 year old and cork is the sensible adult who actually knows how to manage his finances. Anyways, it's good to see that you're giving 6gb to two people. I would have recommended the same thing as that's the most useful way of disposing of the RAM.

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Ignore the people here on this TECH site talking crap about having 24gb of memory it's a fine amount to have as for a ramdisk you will still see benefits from it perhaps look at SuperCache it will act as a layer between your ssd and application you could have it retain the last 16gb of accessed data in memory for quick retrieval and potentially less wear on your drive

not a free app unfortunately but there might be some free alternatives

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Sorry to say but cork is right. Why the hell did you buy that extra 12GB if you didn't even use your existing 12? Sure, it's cheap, but you couldn't have thought of ANYTHING better to spend $100 on than RAM that you don't need? Are your parents so rich that $100 doesn't seem like money to you? If anything it sounds like you're the spoiled 16 year old and cork is the sensible adult who actually knows how to manage his finances. Anyways, it's good to see that you're giving 6gb to two people. I would have recommended the same thing as that's the most useful way of disposing of the RAM.

^ what the ****? Guy asks for some advice and you criticize him for buying it in the first place?

Are you jealous?

I know, right ? jeez LOL

Ignore the people here on this TECH site talking crap about having 24gb of memory it's a fine amount to have as for a ramdisk you will still see benefits from it perhaps look at SuperCache it will act as a layer between your ssd and application you could have it retain the last 16gb of accessed data in memory for quick retrieval and potentially less wear on your drive

not a free app unfortunately but there might be some free alternatives

Thx Striker

______________

a.) rich parents

b.) spoiled 16 year old with no concept of money

d.) none of the above

Interesting you didnt think of the most logical explanation - ever think that someone might have a great job ? One they work hard at - and make decent money ?? that never crossed your minds ? weird.

As for rich parents - unfortunately that is very true - and I split ways with my family because I wanted to work in IT & not in "the family company" - so I have happily worked for what I have - I wanted no gifts if it meant I had to do what I was told. Why unfortunately ? because it caused a split between myself and my parents & I didnt speak to my father for 5 years.... so yeah.

But thanks for asking

primexx - I didnt have to go without anything when buying the RAM - it wasnt a either/or thing. Would you slight someone for buying a candybar when they absolutely didnt need it ? nope - so why take such a stance on this ?

Its all relative, ladies

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I guess you dont want to hear my ThinkPad has 8GB RAM and its just used for browsing web & email -- oh I have mint on a VM -

... you probably didnt want to hear that, huh ? :devil:

Have I ever told you I have a Thinkpad T420 that I use for the same purpose with 8GB of... Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600 SODIMMs? Yes, with the fancy heatspreaders and everything :p (Oh yeah, it also has an OCZ Agility 3 240GB as the primary drive... just sayin'.)

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oooooo - 240GB - that is nice.

I have a Patriot Inferno 120GB - only using half - but I would like the freedom of all of that -

I knew you had a new ThinkPad T-series - ;( my Corsair doesnt have heatspreaders :cry: - I just got pwned :blush:

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Have to love this community generally the answer to everything is "ram is cheap" "you can never have too much ram" that's the kind of advice people give here until someone actually listens and buys a decent amount of ram

texas assuming you are using windows 7 I would imagine it's superfetch should be able to utilize a lot of that ram?

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Just leave it in. You can part it out in your next build, or if you leave it intact it will add years to it's useful lifespan. A lot of older computers are still usable because they've got maxed out RAM.

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Wow - wasnt expecting that kind of response - well Vice is right - RAM is dirt cheap - 12GB Hyper-X T1 for $100 ! Why not ?

If you have 9 computers - newest one is 4 years old ?? are you a hoarder ? one of those people on that Lifetime show ? Please tell me you are only 16 and cant get a good job.....

I guess you dont want to hear my ThinkPad has 8GB RAM and its just used for browsing web & email -- oh I have mint on a VM -

... you probably didnt want to hear that, huh ? :devil:

Exactly

This was exactly the post I was looking for - thank you. You just made my decision for me

There are 2 people who could use 6GB each - thanks !

No worries :)

I would also add, please ignore the posts regarding too much memory, regardless of how you obtained the memory, the question was to make better use of it, who cares if you have 24GB or 192GB?

I don't think superfetch is going to help too much either to tell you the truth, all it will do is load up common programs into the ram at login, you could probably be quite comfortable on 16GB.

I wouldn't worry too much about the future, as by the time we reach a stage where 24GB is a useful amount for games/apps the memory you have will probably be outdated and you would want to upgrade to whatever is out, DDR8 etc..

How i would address the memory would be,

are there any machines which could do with having some of that RAM, Servers etc.. not just friends and family but any around your home? I say leave friends and family out for the time being as RAM is cheap so if they need an upgrade then they could easily purchase it, if after a week or so you want to donate, then thats great.

If you have a technet subscription or access to Microsoft software, are you interested in setting up a virtual Windows network for learning/testing, such as an AD + SharePoint 2010 + Exchange 2010 + SQL Server 2008R2/Denali, SharePoint on it's own needs a minimum of 8GB RAM with 16GB being the sweet spot. With those servers you could easily eat up the memory

(I left linux out as it's sort of works the other way with RAM than windows, i.e. Windows spec's usually are the minimum to get the system working for a network, with linux you can cut down the RAM right to the bone and only really utilise it as the number of users/databases/emails grows).

The final option is to leave it in there and just ignore the fact you never have to worry about running out of RAM :D

I can't think of any apps that will touch 24GB, unless you were heavily into video editing even then 16GB is usually a good amount, the same with photoshop, perhaps if you were running Photoshop + Illustrator whilst adding hi def images to inDesign then 24GB might be a good amount. However i think for most use 16GB would be a good amount. I know that with 8GB a lot of apps will run like incredibly quick, especially with the processor + SSD config you have already.

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Im pretty sure there are RAM drive apps that automatically unload data to disk on shutdown, and then load it back up on boot.

Of course, if you're talking about many GB of info, that could be an irritating sequence. I know lots of Minecraft players put the game on a RAM drive, since it's so ridiculously HDD intensive, but (relatively) small for a game.

I'm not sure what other apps are out there that have a similar situation going on.

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Thanks Seizure & REM2000

I tried a 4GB RAM drive & I didnt notice any difference. I think its because I have so little running on my computer that the SSD & RAM already make everything instantaneous.

I could load a game in the RAMdisk - but not sure what the results would be ....

Thank You for the advice

chc - I'm still jealous of ya ;)

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How are you measuring system RAM usage? I just used Resource Monitor for a quick summary glance to see if 24GB is a worthy amount of RAM for my primary machine. I'll share the results with you here.

The majority of my RAM is lost in two places.

1. Active Use: ~17GB. So if I have less than this amount of RAM in the system I'll be paging to disk, which is slower.

2. System Standby: ~7GB. This is super fetch hard at work. Since Super Fetch has managed to fill the last 7GB of RAM that will enhance my machine speed in loading programs and other things.

My recommendation to be would be to use your computer in a typical day and monitor your active use load and system standby and see where they stand at the high point of your day. If you have a lot of RAM still unused then you can consider getting rid of some, otherwise you're already using it!

post-16763-0-66909300-1322118224.png

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been using Qsoft RAMdisk for ages - I always allocate around 4GB to it, been putting Sandboxie sandboxes, all internet temp files, scratch disk for Photoshop etc... also use it for many portable applications - on reboot virgin sandboxes and no cleaning junk to do :)

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I'll check out superfetch -

If you have or choose a modern SSD, you should have Superfetch turned off. It is a RAM cache for mainly HDD and old very slow SSD.

1. Active Use: ~17GB. So if I have less than this amount of RAM in the system I'll be paging to disk, which is slower.

The picture you provide show that your largest running processes use somewhere around 2.5 GB RAM. Does that mean that you have somewhere about hundreds of small apps running using less than 45MB RAM each?

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If you have or choose a modern SSD, you should have Superfetch turned off. It is a RAM cache for mainly HDD and old very slow SSD.

I wouldn't disable Super Fetch on an SSD. It doesn't require write cycles so it won't wear down the SSD and it will only use unused RAM.

Remember, RAM is still a TON faster than the fastest SSD.

The picture you provide show that your largest running processes use somewhere around 2.5 GB RAM. Does that mean that you have somewhere about hundreds of small apps running using less than 45MB RAM each?

I won't explain the details of the RAM usage, but for me it is a very typical use amount.

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Nice amount of memory people have these days im on 3gb as 1 gb died and im broke haha

As for ramdisk i would use it mainly for chrome/firefox and then video editing/file converting (movies) to see if there was a boost in converting speed (im on a raptor) other than that im not sure maybe a few games that took a while to load to see if there was a performance gain then i would just twiddle me thumbs and find something stupid to do. I really should upgrde myself but im in two minds laptop or computer upgrade being broke sucks when you canna afford them both =( lol

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Thanks for all the advice - Frazell - Im gonna do what you suggested - thanks -

I have a Vertex 3 rightnow - and Im happy with it.

I always tell me fiance - "Im happy with what I have - but never satisfied."

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