Ram drive / virtual ram obsolete in 2018?

[Ztdutxjgxgtu]

Seldom see this topic around.
I heard of people(1st gen IT guys) saying use hard drive to allocate some space act as rams, back in the days of win 98, xp.
Of coz speed is very slow for spinning drive

So now with fast nvme ssd all around.
It this "ram drive" technology still working??

 

[Doctor Rob]

Some people may still use it but I think for the most part in my mind yea is not that important now with the faster drives and such.. one thing that is nice now is https://www.fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardware/46145-amd-storemi-works-like-a-charm-on-x470-chipset-motherboards the amd storemi.. there is a Intel equivalent I think though I also think on that you pay extra for it..

 

[Gam3r01]

Page file is not really as common anymore, but with intel optane I believe that is exactly what you are asking about.

 

[dalaran]

It's something I used in my younger days (think 1995 or so) these days it isn't really relevant, SSDs are fast enough that you won't see a difference. Don't bother with it, it adds extra complexity with no noticeable gain of performance except in very specific use cases (where very high speed actually matter). There are still softwares around that can be used to create a ramdisk should you still need to (Dataram RAMDisk / ImDisk and others for windows).

Note this is not about the pagefile as far as I can tell Ram drives and page files are 2 different things, the pagefile is still useful whenever your ram get's full space on the disk will be used instead of the physical memory, the ramdrive is actually a portion of the physicial ram memory you reserve to create a virtual disk drive, since it's in ram it's really fast but the space is usually limited (since RAM is limited) and the content of the drive is also lost once the computers reboots. Typical uses used to be for temporary files and other things you didn't need to be persisted to disk.

 

[rhysiam]

It's still an option. There's a range of software around that allows you to set up a RAM drive.

Definitely SSDs have reduced the demand need for them though. Mechanical HDDs aren't too bad at sequential read/writes. SSDs are faster, of course, but only like 2-10 times as fast as a decent HDD. So for sequential workloads, like copying large files around, HDDs are actually pretty competitive. Plus, you can always improve sequential performance through striping (like RAID 0, or RAID 10). People who just wanted high sequential throughput generally got everything they needed either from mechanical hard drives. Those who needed more (sequential) performance and had the budget would just throw a higher-end RAID card and more drives at the problem.

Random IO, on the other hand, is a totally different story. Because of the need to move a physical head over a spinning disk, mechanical HDDs have always been terrible at random reads/writes. So things like booting a machine (or virtual machine), or launching an application, which generates loads of tiny read requests from all over the drive, run very poorly on mechanical hard drives. Here SSDs are comfortably 50-100 times faster. Unlike sequential IO, adding more drives doesn't help that much either because you're still waiting for a physical head to move into position and the drive to spin.

It was the random IO that really benefited from RAM drives... and it's the random IO that SSDs have made such a big difference to. RAM is still far faster at random requests than SSDs, but given that SSDs are already >50 times faster than a HDD for these sort of workloads, that's more than fast enough for the vast majority of people.

The other thing I'd add is that I believe modern operating systems are getting better at caching relevant data in RAM. There's no benefit to having RAM empty, so if you have plenty of RAM Windows (and other moderns OSes) will leave (= "cache") data in RAM just in case you use it again. I moved to 32GB RAM a while back and noticed that applications launched for a second time, even much later, will load almost instantly. When I open something like Photoshop the first time it takes a while. But with 32GB RAM I can close it, play a bunch of games, do some video editing, etc, and then open Photoshop again and it will load almost instantly. There's so much spare RAM that Windows will just leave the Photoshop assets in there in case they're needed again, which is exactly what a RAM drive would do anyway. With a dedicated RAM drive I could directly control what's stored there, which might be helpful, but you still need to move the data into the RAM drive at boot (RAM loses all data once unpowered) and you have to manage the small amount of RAM storage manually. The point is, often it's better just to let Windows (or whatever OS you have) manage your RAM in the background. It's actually pretty decent at caching IMHO.

 

[smorizio]

ram drives are used mostly on video editing rigs and eng drawing software. most times these are called scratch drives. when your dealing with 50g or larger photos images it helps on render speed to have some of the work in a ram drive. the bad side of a ram drive is if the ram goes bad and cruppes the ram drive or there a power loss and all the work in the drive is lost.

 

[Ztdutxjgxgtu]

Yes i heard it function as ram , not hard drive.