Can I make a Ram Drive in Windows 7

[papagym]

My new PC has 16 GB of DDR3 1600 MHz of Ram installed. Why did I buy so much you say? It cost only $85.99 for all of it. 8 GB was $72.99 at the time. My son paid $110 for 2-4 GB for his old HP Paviian a month later.

10-15 years back I read some articles a RAM Drives but I've not seen any since.

I have no idea of how much RAM, Windows 7 can address

Can I or should I make a Ram Drive out of some of it to use with Windows 7?

How would I do this. Thanks

 

[shanky887614]

if you are running windows x64 it can and will use all of it


you would be better off getting an ssd than using a ram drive

 

[Onlyusemeisaac]

Yes! You can! I had a 4GB RAM Disk for a while when I had 12GB of RAM.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

Free version lets you create partitions up to 4GB in size. I stuck my pagefile on mine, but you could stick anything on it. Feel free to ask any more questions.

 

[papagym]

if you are running windows x64 it can and will use all of it


you would be better off getting an ssd than using a ram drive

Thanks I already use a SSD as my boot drive.

Ram is much faster than any SSD on the market today.

 

[papagym]

Yes! You can! I had a 4GB RAM Disk for a while when I had 12GB of RAM.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

Free version lets you create partitions up to 4GB in size. I stuck my pagefile on mine, but you could stick anything on it. Feel free to ask any more questions.

Thanks for the web address. Yes, some new Mobo's are supportng 64 GB of RAM. I thought I saw a board a couple of months ago that was up to 128 GB but I can't remember.

 

[blazorthon]

Some *consumer* boards can support up to 256GB... However, the RAM modules needed cost more than than the motherboard which is already in the hundreds of US dollars. Going past 32GB of RAM is not cheap and 32GB itself already tends to cost more than twice as much as 16GB (4x4GB=16GB and 4x8GB=32GB) because 8GB modules are more expensive than two 4GB modules.

IMDisk is a free virtual disk driver than can create RAM drives of a size that is only limited by how much RAM you have. It can even let you use more than 4GB of RAM when you have a 32 bit OS! It also supports mounting of ISO images and more and is freeware.

EDIT:
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk

 

[J_E_D_70]

Can I ask what types of programs you plan to put on the ramdisk?

I had thought about using a small one for the pagefile but instead opted to just turn if off.

 

[niz]

Yes! You can! I had a 4GB RAM Disk for a while when I had 12GB of RAM.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

Free version lets you create partitions up to 4GB in size. I stuck my pagefile on mine, but you could stick anything on it. Feel free to ask any more questions.

Wow. Have you considered the circular logic of that?
The whole point of a pagefile is just to implement more virtual memory than you have physical ram by using disk space instead.
By putting the pagefile in a ramdisk you're basically just adding several layers of inefficiency to ultimately accessing the same ram.
Assuming thats all you're using the ramdrive for, you'd be much better off by not having a ram drive at all (so freeing up that ram) so the system can just use it directly (i.e. faster) and can also use only as much as it needs. Unlike dynamic usage, even an empty formatted ramdrive occupies a lot of memory.
So where to put the swapfile?:
For some stupid reason windows does do lots of write ops to the swap file even when you have a lot of free memory. If your hardware and usage pattern is like most peoples, you generally only run one or two apps concurrently and they aren't memory hogs, so your actual memory usage is probably such that you never likely to run out of physical ram anyway, negating the whole need for a swapfile.
In that case you can turn swapping off completely (in windows its under the computer properties/advanced tab somewhere). Turning off swapping altogher is probably an especially good idea if you have windows installed on an SSD, as you are then stopping all that pointless disk I/O to the swapfile, meaning you're not pounding your limited lifespan SSD with a bunch of unnecessary but continuous write operations, so significantly decreasing the lifespan of it.
If you really get into it, you'll soon find Windows also writes to the registry all the time (at least 10 times a second) even when the computer is idle. That would be my second thing to stop in order to extend the life of my SSD. One approach might be to install windows on an SSD for fast booting etc but then hack the config and move just the registry and "Documents and Settings" folder (which includes most of the regularly written-to things like the desktop, temp folders, user config and application data folders etc) over to a slower but much longer write-life mechanical drive.

 

[papagym]

Thanks Guys for the input.
FYI I do have Windows 7 Ultimate 64 on a my SSD. Its amazing how fast it is. I don't know that Win-7 will ever address more than half the 16 GB of RAM on my Sys.. (But I may be wrong) So I just thought a 4 GB ramdisk could be used for a lot of things. Especially when used with CAD. I have not used my CAD programs with Win-7 yet, so I'm hoping they will work once I get then off of the IDE drive they are on now.