Ram Drive Q: Does program run in RAM or not

probablecause

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Jul 10, 2013
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If I install a video program (converter, create, etc.) in my 6 GB ram drive (Drive Q), does it truly run in RAM environment if I save the file to my C drive or do i have to save the output file to my Q drive to see the benefits of speed. Video conversion can take a while and I want it to be as fast as it can.

Thanks, Brendan
 
Solution
Video transcoding software is usually limited by the capabilities of the CPU, not the IO capabilities of most modern storage systems.

RAMdisks are often useless and detrimental. Windows will already use spare memory as a large disk cache. The one case where it "may" be useful is as a scratch pad for HD video editing. However, professional editing software already takes advantage of large amounts of memory.
Video transcoding software is usually limited by the capabilities of the CPU, not the IO capabilities of most modern storage systems.

RAMdisks are often useless and detrimental. Windows will already use spare memory as a large disk cache. The one case where it "may" be useful is as a scratch pad for HD video editing. However, professional editing software already takes advantage of large amounts of memory.
 
Solution
Thanks, I am running 16gb on Windows 8, with a MSI 760GM-p34(FX) mb and an amd fx-6100 (no overclocking) CPU. Was thinking about shedding of 6 gb of RAM and running my video software on it. I currently have a Kingston 120gb SSD and did not know if it would benefit from the video software on the ram drive. The MB only support 3gb sata.
 


RAMDisks will almost never benefit applications themselves. They may benefit the loading of application data into memory if that application data is stored in a RAMDisk.

If for example you wanted to edit a video by cutting it up into pieces and adding effects, you could store the raw video on a RAMDisk and use video editing software stored normally on your hard disk. The video editing software will itself be loaded into memory for execution and it will then load chunks of the video from the storage location into its own heap memory for editing. Then it will write the changes back out when the changes are saved. Normally this would be done to and from the hard drive, which can add a little delay depending on the size of the file and performance of the drive. The changes are however, permanent. If the file system that the source movie is located on is located in primary memory, then the video editing software can load it from the RAMDisk into its own software heap. This creates a duplicate of the data in memory, one copy in the RAMDisk and one in the heap, rather than one copy on the hard disk and one on the heap.

The drawback here (incase it wasn't clear above) is that the storage space allocated to the RAMDisk becomes committed to the RAMDisk and will be unusable by other applications or the operating system. Modern kernels are extremely good at handling memory and employ more than 60 years of R&D in their design. Taking that control away from them is extremely unorthodox and violates pretty much every best practice that I can think of. Any professional editing tool will use whatever memory it can get its hands on to cache as much data as it can, no need to store the whole thing in a RAMDisk only to have the program make a second copy of it.