Using RAM as storage

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whatever61

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Jul 29, 2010
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There's this app that allows you to use RAM as a storage and even mount it as a permanent drive.

They suggest that you can use it to store browser cache for example and speed up your browser speed.

However, I already have a SSD drive, which I know that is slower than RAM. But do you think I will actually benefit from it in this case in terms of speed (or maybe the bottleneck is not the harddrive in this case?) ?
 
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it says it creates a virtual temporary storage space.when you reboot everything in there will be wiped out.if you are running out of storage and need something temporary this might help.i havent tried it and i might not even try it because usb 3.0 is enoughf for me.try it although the amount of ram you will use for space will not be available in windows.i find it useless.
 
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It's still going to disappear when the power is turned off. RAM is "volatile" storage, & needs to be powered on to store anything. However, what the app may do is store the files on the hard drive, then load them into your RAM when it runs, since the RAM performance will be better than even an SSD.

The only problem is the amount of storage space. Most people have 4-8GB of RAM on their system, & can maybe expect half of that to be available at any time. However, you can easily pick up a 1TB hard drive, or a 120-128GB SSD, for the same price as 8GB of RAM. In other words, you're paying for the speed boost by a lack of storage space. And a lot of games, especially things like BF3/4 or Starcraft II, take up more space than will fit onto the RAM.

I think it works best if you're doing processing with encoding media files, where having a faster storage space would help in accessing the files. But for a long-term storage option it's probably not the best.
 
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I have 8GB RAM and I usually use around 5GB, so an option would be to create 1-2GB RAM drive, if I would know that indeed it would make a difference in speed.

Not talking about getting anything new here. Just using the existing stuff i have.

I use a lot of browsing, have a lot of tabs opened and lots of addons, apparently this becomes heavy and takes a while to load. So if that could speed this up, it would good already..
 
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You might see some speedup, but that will depend on other factors as well, including but not limited to: the rest of your system, connection speed, etc. The main reason people usually use ramdiscs for browser caches is to reduce writes to a SSD. Since SSDs have a finite life and the browser cache is just transient data, it burns up p/e cycles of the cells. By moving the cache to ramdisc, you remove those p/e cycles from the SSD, and just store the temporary data in ram. And while ramdiscs do have very high write/read speeds, the gains aren't as meaningful for web browsing(in my experience) as some would have you believe.

 
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Here what it says:

You can use the RAM disk as a temporary storage container (any files will be wiped out after reboot) or mount it as a permanent drive that will maintain the content across reboot.

USB3.0 has nothing to do with this. Sorry. We are talking about built-in drives
 
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I'm not familiar with the particular ramdisc program you are referring to, but I've used SoftPerfect RAMDisc. It allows you to set up an image file of your ramdisc, that can be saved at a frequency of your choice. i.e. If you make a 1GB ramdisc, it will back up that entire ramdisc to another drive every 5 minutes. You can also set it to auto launch on startup, so that by the time windows is loaded the ramdisc is already setup and the backedup image is loaded onto it.

As an example, I sometimes use a ramdisc to host a small minecraft server. Its a 1GB ramdisc. Every 10 minutes the entire ramdisc is saved to F: drive(its a mechanical HDD). If I stop the ramdisc program, all the data in the ramdisc goes away, but I still have that backup image. When I relaunch the ramdisc program, or startup windows, that backup image is loaded, from the mechanical HDD back onto the ramdisc and is once again available.
 
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Operating systems already use uncommitted memory as a cache. Using a RAMDisk as a cache only prevents the operating system from doing its job properly. RAMDisks are only useful in a very few select applications, such as a video-editing scratchpad.
 
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The software is AMD Radeon Ramdisk. I use it. Its free for creating RAMDisks upto 4GB (6GB if you use AMD RAM). Paid version for Ramdisks upto 64GB is available for $20.
I have installed software Autocad and 3DSMax. Loading times, opening times response etc are better as RAM is a faster memory (3rd after GPU memory and CPU cache I think).
Since RAM is not a permanent memory, Everything will be erased if you shut down, or it gets accidentally shutdown, hangs whatever.
There is an option to create an image of the RAMdisk on your HDD when you shut down so it will write whatever you have on RAMDisk on your permanent storage(SSD or HDD) as a image file and When you turn on again, it will write image back to RAMDisk. The drawback of this system is that the shutdown and startup times are increased (Upto 20 minutes for a 50GB RamDisk).
Talking about speed, in real world, RAMDisk will be about 10-15 times faster than a conventional SSD.
 
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Verma has mentioned above much of what I have seen or experienced so far playing with RAMDisk software (which admittedly is not a whole lot.) The ones that I had looked at a while back had free options and then paid options. The free options had limited total RAMDisk size (4 GB is most common) and may lack some of the options such as being able to write that data back to a storage drive to save the state during system shutdown or startup. With the full paid versions of the software, however, you could create much larger RAMDisk drives if you have the memory capacity to support it.

Since RAM by its nature will lose all data when it is powered down, the software should have an option to save that data back to the hard drive of your choice IF you need to save the data. If you are only moving temp file folders then you don't need to save the data and it can just be lost when the system shuts down. This means there is no hit to your startup or shutdown times. However, if you do wish to save the data, everything must be transferred, so the more data you have in your RAMDisk, the longer that is going to take to write back or read from your drive.

RAM operates at much greater throughput than even several SSDs in RAID 0, so it makes sense that a program which is going to be needing that sort of throughput for small data would benefit from moving it to RAM. However, at least with most of the instances that I played with, it is best to use it more for temp space or as a scratch disk space than for permanently running full programs or persistent data within. For example, the situation that I tested this all out with was for use as a scratch disk for design workstations. Within the Adobe software you can configure your preferences for scratch disks (which one to use first, the amount of space, etc.) I created a 4 GB scratch disk in RAM on a workstation with 16 GB of total memory available. On most any smaller sized project the performance was amazing. However, once you started working with much larger files or complex designs with a lot of effects and file history, then the scratch disk became full and temp files would then also be pushed to the hard drive, which basically meant that you now were only getting the throughput of your hard drive speed and not the RAMDisk.

Other software didn't work quite as nicely with the scratch disk on the RAMDisk drive simply because of limited capacity. In another application they used called Flexi, you can set up your destination for temporary files and scratch disk, and while 4 GB of temp space was enough for most files, if you have Adobe open and Flexi open both using the same 4 GB of scratch disk it quickly fills up. The down side to this is Flexi is not smart enough or capable of using a different location or hard drive for additional temp file space. Once the RAMDisk space is full, the program crashes.

So, long story short, if you have a ton of RAM and only need 4 GB of space for your RAMDisk and never need anything more, then it may be a good fit. If you need more space than that and buy the software versions that allow for larger RAMDisks then even that should be good. But like everything there are limitations and it may not work for everything or in every situation. It's hard to say or recommend until we knew a little more of your specific situation and planned usage of it. If it is only for browser caching then I'd say it may not be worth it. Performance-wise your SSD will offer more than enough throughput and you will really be limited by the speed of which your internet, network, etc. will transfer the data. The only reason for moving it would be for eliminating the possible wear on your SSD which was also mentioned above.
 
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