Ramdrive?

[PalominoBURN]

I got this program that helps you create a simple and ready to use RAM drive out of the ram you have in your system. I figured since I have 1 GIG of ram I have at least 384 MB or more to spare. SO I made a 300MB ram drive, and directed my WINDOWS SWAPFILE to be stored on this drive, along with my internet explorer cache space. WOW! Does it make a difference. Browsing the internet and have 84 MB of ram as your cache space instead of using your harddrive. The best part is once you reset it dumps all the contents of course, or you can have it set to back-up your info. I am using absolutely no... HARDDRIVE for swap file or caching. I still can't understand why XP wants to cache things to virtual memory, when it has PLENTY of RAM.. Go figure. However this is the solution. I HIGHLY recommend. NO MORE HARD DRIVE SWAPPING!!!

[KaHNZa]

Whats the name of the program?

[PalominoBURN]

www.superspeed.com

It's called RAMDISK

[FunkDaMonkMan]

I may need another 512 after hearing this.

[KaHNZa]

Are there any good Ramdisk programs that are freeware?

[nahmus]

I'm suprised that it is for INTEL CPU's only. I wonder why it does not work with AMD. I've used ramdrives for a long time on unix servers and if configured correctly thay can give a system a real kick in the chips!

[JDXNC]

It shouldn't have anything to do with the CPU, I used a program similar to this on Windows 98 back when my K6-2 450 was my main rig, I had 256MB of ram so I found a good use for it. If Only I could afford a gig of ram to do it on XP I would now.

Edit, just checked, they have versions for AMD and Intel Cpu's

[nahmus]

that what I would think but I read the writeup on the ramdrive software and it says specifically that it will only work in INTEL CPU's

I wonder why?

[JDXNC]

Just edited my post above, there are versions for both.

Edit again: Here is a manual solution for 9x systems, I will see if there is a way to do it in the NT kernal.

http://www.thetechzone.com/articles/ram_drive/

[PalominoBURN]

GUYS! read the signature.. I AM RUNNING AMD! It runs fine. There is an AMD and intel model. Don't spaz, and YES it's worth getting another 512 stick! However realize overclockers that you might have to suffer a MHZ loss. I only lost 50 MHZ and I gained ALOT more with this tweak. I say MHZ loss cause anytime you have more tehn 1 STICK of ram overclocks become alot more FLAKLY

[ninthebin]

doess it take effect on startup, as in creates the ram drive, and the page file has no stress over this and works as if it was there all the time, or do you have to keep assigning it to the ram drive?

[PalominoBURN]

Ok it's like this. The program creates a RAMDRIVE in the amount of ram you desire. I chose my drive to be 384MB, because I have a gig of it. So once the program creates the ramdrive you will see a new hard drive in the my computer window. it will be whatever letter you chose during set-up, mine was X. So I went to the windows tab that lets you set where you want your swap file. I pointed it to the X drive and it accept my request. I rebooted and BAM it works fine. It shows that it's using X drive for swapfile. I also set my internet options so that my internet cookies, cache etc. will be dumped to a folder on the X drive called /temp. This is soo sweet cause each reboot purges the ram of it's info so you wipe the SWAP FILE, and your INTERNET TRASH! Such a perfect combo. Makes internet browsing ZIPPY if you have a fast connection. Big difference is on sites with LOTS of images and and long pages. They load so fast now.

[nahmus]

that is a sweet setup with the swapfile. I'm still a little perplexed at what can be different in their programs that they made an AMD version and an INTEL version. just being a geek. its what I do best
:D

[PalominoBURN]

They make RAMDRIVE cards. I found one at my local computer resaler. It holds dimms ram, up to 2GB. I am thinking of buying it, however it does cost 200$. It has no ram, however I got plenty of dimms ram laying around to use. What do you guys think? This thing plugs into your pci slot and you can stick in ram to it and create a much begger ram drive of 2GB. This would be good for installing games or even having an OS flash it's run time files?

[L337 M33P]

Heh little do you know that IE files containing past records are in fact scattered throughout the registry, C: drive and your documents and settings folders. Just FYI

I might try this - looks speedy

[nahmus]

Originally posted by PalominoBURN
They make RAMDRIVE cards. I found one at my local computer resaler. It holds dimms ram, up to 2GB. I am thinking of buying it, however it does cost 200$. It has no ram, however I got plenty of dimms ram laying around to use. What do you guys think? This thing plugs into your pci slot and you can stick in ram to it and create a much begger ram drive of 2GB. This would be good for installing games or even having an OS flash it's run time files?

I wonder how much having the memory on the PCI bus would slow it down, if any?

[CrashOveride]

Originally posted by nahmus


I wonder how much having the memory on the PCI bus would slow it down, if any?

Well normal memory runs at anywhere from 100mhz to over 200 depending on your system, then its probably DDR so the differnce btwn 33mhz and 400 mhz... I would say a bit (unless I have a large misunderstanding of how that all works).

[XWRed1]

Its just going to show up as an ide controller on your pci bus, thats how the enclosure works. The OS won't actually *know* that there is ram in there. Its not going to slow down your pci bus anymore than a fast hard drive on a controller would.

[nahmus]

no I was meaning access to the ram drive through the PCI bus.

I'm guessing that for speed you would be better off loading up your dimms, but for price and bulk the PCI card should do well.

[JDXNC]

I'm pretty sure that a virtual ram drive in your system ram would be faster than a PCI ram drive, which at max could run at 133Mhz vs 266/333/400 compared to DDR ram. I think it would be even better yet on an Opteron system because it won't have to go through the FSB to reach the ram, so it would act like one hella fast HDD.

[KaHNZa]

Is there a free version? I really wanna try this out. But don't have the money to buy RamDisk 2000 Pro. :eh?:

[Arkaine23]

haha! Windows sucks the way it uses swap. Look at what you gotta do to force it to use up your free ram instead of swapping to the hdd. Even the "conservative swap useage" reg settings don't fix window's insistance on swapping. Something like this is not necessary in unix or linux.

[KaHNZa]

I'd run linux if I knew I could do everything I might wanna do. And all my hardware is supported, along with being able to use MSN Messenger. And if someone can kinda show me the ropes. Like how to get F@H running under Linux.

Edit: Maybe a picture guide on how to do certain things.

[Arkaine23]

No problem. Head to alt os and give a dual boot a chance. You'd be surprised that you can install some distros as easily as win2k or XP. Just realize that you are kind of starting over as far as what you know about OS's. For a little while, you're gonna have to hit a forum or google.com/linux in order to figure out how to do even simple things. Frustration is natural, even the urge to kill is not uncommon for a new linux user... But once you crest that hill, you start seeing how some things are done better (and how others are still disorgainzed), but your skills will be all-around improved.

MSN- There's AMSN in linux for that. Also gaim and kopete.

Hardware- everything's pretty good now, even with Nforce2. Sound can sometimes be a little tricky though, depends on what you have. Just gaming lags compared to windows.... best to use nvidia cards if you want to game in linux. ATI is not very good at making linux drivers (no fault to the linux OS's themselves).

F@H is easy. Plenty of forums-goers can help ya on that score.

[nahmus]

Originally posted by Arkaine23
haha! Windows sucks the way it uses swap. Look at what you gotta do to force it to use up your free ram instead of swapping ot the hdd. Even the "conservative swap useage" reg settings don't fix window's instance on swapping. Something like this is not necessary in unix or linux.

I've been doing unix for way to long and everytime someone tells me that windows is gonna kill unix I tell them its alot easier for unix to LOOK like windows than it is for windows to PERFORM like unix

[KaHNZa]

If someone could possibly help me out:

http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=221814

[Stedeman]

Slow down guys a RAM Drive card will peak out the PCI buss and it is the fastest PC storage drive out there now. Here is a link to the rocket drive (one of the first commercially available RAM Drives out)
http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm
Off their site:
Beyond an innovative PCI bus-attached design and affordable pricing, Rocket Drive also offers the following key features:
Scalability: Rocket Drive is available in several configurations to meet the varying needs of Cenatek’s customers. Memory configurations start at 512 MB and go up to 4 GB, with plans to expand to 8 GB.
High-Speed Data Transfer: Rocket Drive’s data transfer rates reach up to 132 MB per second (burst rate) and 80 MB to 115 MB per second (sustained rate), depending on the system’s load. These rates represent speeds that are two-to-five times faster than conventional SSDs and thousands of times faster than standard hard disk drives.
Ease of Use: Rocket Drive’s board-level, plug-and-play design automates installation into a company’s desktops and servers. Installing a Rocket Drive takes less than five minutes and requires no special software.

Just think about it: A HDDs fastest data transfer is when it uses its Buffer! How many gigs a second dose your RAM do?!?

[druidelder]

Link (http://www.arsoft-online.de/products/product.php?id=1) to a freeware RAMDrive program.

[PalominoBURN]

HARD DRIVES are in ms.. everything else is in ns. So go figure. The ram drive would be ALOT FASTER... ALOT! Yes the PCI bus may hinder top end transfer, however low end grunt and next to no seek time. COME ON... are we really debating this?

[PalominoBURN]

Sorry for double post

[XWRed1]

I'm left wondering if it truly pays off to waste your ram storing the Windows pagefile. I've seen people who write Windows device drivers for a living say this is a bad idea.

Windows swaps things for a reason. It is supposed to swap them out when they haven't been used in a long while so there is more free memory in case that memory needs to be filled quick... since its more likely some active or new task will allocate more memory rather than that app that has been inactive for hours to suddenly need memory.

[druidelder]

It probably depends on how much RAM you have to begin with and how you run your system. Personally, none of my programs sits for very long. If it's open, I'm using it (the various tasks that windows thinks it needs to run, well that's another story). I was thinking about doing this in my machine that has 1.5 gigs of ram. Even when doing music/video editing I only reach about 800MB of usage. Windows still feels the need to swap though. Why have half a gig sitting there waiting for something that is not going to happen. If windows is going to swap anyway, I might as well make it faster.

If you have more ram than you use, I think it helps. But if your ram sees a lot of 100% usage, you'd probably break even at best.

[XWRed1]

Lets see... there is that one option in the System properties for optimizing for interactive usage or server usage. I forget the exact verbage it uses. If you change it from interactive, perhaps it'll change the paging behavior.

[nil_esh]

Originally posted by XWRed1
I'm left wondering if it truly pays off to waste your ram storing the Windows pagefile. I've seen people who write Windows device drivers for a living say this is a bad idea.

Yeah, I've heard many many arguments against using RAM for swap. Supposedly, it worked well in Win95, but in Win98 they changed the memory manager, and NT is entirely different.

Here are some swapping concepts I have read about (though I don't know about specific implementations and how Windows works):

Pages that are only used once (e.g. initialization) are swapped because they will never be used again.

Pages can be swapped proactively. So they still exist in RAM, but are also in the swap file, in case RAM is suddenly needed. If RAM is needed, the pages can simply be erased since they already exist in the swap file.

In Linux, you don't even need swap if you have enough RAM. Note that the rule that swap should be twice the size of RAM doesn't apply: http://wombat.san-francisco.ca.us/faqomatic/cache/53.html

[JoT]

In WinXP you can disable the paging file, unfortunately this is not the case in Win2K.

[litghost]

you can disable the paging file, it just doesnt do anything

[JohnnyTheRed]

So what's the verdict?

If you have a free gigabyte or two of RAM, would this be a help? What for though? Page file? Temporary Internet Files? Is that it?

How much of a difference would there be?

How much RAM would you need for a WinXP install, and boot from a RAMdrive?

- Thanks

[gusgizmo]

the problem with a ramdrive (unless you use the card with an external power source) is that all your data dies when you restart or shut down. with the ramdrive software, the workaround would be to copy all the data to the HD when you go down. but this would be seriously slow with windows, when installs are looking at more than 1.2GB in size. if there is a program that you use alot, you might look into running it in the ramdrive, it might give you better performance. internet explorers cache is a good example, or mozilla, or opera for that matter. a games level files is another good idea. this would work especially well in linux because you could have the ram drive mount inside the applications folder, so you could run it normally without changing the game, and you wouldnt have to copy the whole thing into the ram drive either. i know for a game like diablo II or warcraft 3 (running with winex) this would be awesome.

this is really starting to look like a good idea to me!

[Crash893]

is it me or woudl putting the pageing file on the ram drive elimnate the point of a page file in the first place?


i loaded photo shop into a ram drive once
it was awsome

[fiji]

Originally posted by Arkaine23
haha! Windows sucks the way it uses swap. Look at what you gotta do to force it to use up your free ram instead of swapping to the hdd. Even the "conservative swap useage" reg settings don't fix window's insistance on swapping. Something like this is not necessary in unix or linux.



yeah i noticed that too, my windows swap file is quite large even when im just casually browsing internet and whatnot


will ill check my gentoo server, and generally it will only have about 70mbs of ram used/cached

and 0 swap file

ive only seen it touch the swap file about 3 times, and thats when ive had kde and about a bajillion different apps open (this is on 384mbs of ram)

[XWRed1]

is it me or woudl putting the pageing file on the ram drive elimnate the point of a page file in the first place?

It would. It is retarded to do so.

[jimstandard]

this is what lieberman computers does on their desktops well its an option and i am convinced that this site is real www.go-l.com

[I.M.O.G.]

It would. It is retarded to do so.

How do you suggest you stop XP from using the pagefile when you have 600MB of RAM that never gets touched? It is retarded to have to do so because of windows, but I think its a good work around to do so.

I never saw this thread until now, but figured I would bump it as it sounds interesting... Will try when I get home.

[flixotide]

I don't care much for the pagefile, I'd rather want to run my games from there.

I recall the good old Amiga 500 days, where you had 2-3 megs of fast-ram used for building ram drives, and then copying diskette images to ram. Games would literally explode in speed.

Oooooops, my company accidently just purchased a ramdrive program :p

Cheers, Flix

[XWRed1]

How do you suggest you stop XP from using the pagefile when you have 600MB of RAM that never gets touched? It is retarded to have to do so because of windows, but I think its a good work around to do so.

I never saw this thread until now, but figured I would bump it as it sounds interesting... Will try when I get home.

Besides pointing out the falty logic behind taking away a certain portion of ram to host a file that is supposed to add that same amount of virtual memory to your system, you should at least skim this thread:
http://forums.2cpu.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=10014&highlight=ramdrive

Jeh goes into the subject in great detail there. Heck, just reading his first post in the thread should be enough.

[I.M.O.G.]

EDIT: Wrong, only reading his first post would not be enough, it'd be a crime. ;)

There is only faulty logic on one side of that coin, and we all know most coins come with two sides...

That ins't faulty logic if the RAM isn't utilized. I have 1.25GB of RAM and I rarely use over 500MB of it, especially now that I don't game on my system. Still, there is pagefile activity however... This thread made me curious about the possibility of axeing that.

Thank you for the linkage, as its very interesting and informative, though painful to read with the pompous attitudes there.

It becomes very clear in the first post that there is a subject jeh does not want to spend time elaborating upon for the sake of his side of this argument; It is clear that the side of the argument that jeh quickly skims over at first is what if you have so much ram that the pagefile isn't hardly hit anyways. There was only one sentence in reference to this situation, and then it is abandoned - it doesn't support the point he is trying to make so it wasn't pursued. Or so I thought...

That is what I am talking about... And he proceeds to conceed the point that it could speed up certain types of access patterns... And I quote:

And if you have plenty of RAM to spare, then sure, you can allocate some to a disk cache, and for certain types of file access patterns, it can speed things up. Sometimes tremendously. I never claimed otherwise...

This basically highlights where my understanding met its limits... There is a difference between what he concedes here, and then what he later explains about pagefile IO's and such.

Well, it seems there is always a LITTLE stuff in the pagefile, and a few pagefile IOs per second, regardless of how much free RAM you have. (Mostly due to apps creating pagefile-backed sections and then calling FlushViewOfFile, forcing the section contents to be written out to the backing store.)

The reason that putting the pagefile EITHER on a RAMdisk or in a disk cache STILL won't improve performance is that the IOs we're talking about here are so few and far between (as I said, about 7 per second during these builds I've been doing) that speeding them up just isn't going to have a noticeable effect.

Thanks for the read, though it took me a while, it was well worth the look through. A lot to learn there.

Obviously I don't have the technical training and/or experience to pick parts of that away... However I question if the amount of faith he holds in windows handling things correctly is somewhat misplaced.

Why should you not disable services that are not utilized but instead leave this to windows to straighten out... I have seen many systems running low on resources, which weren't sufficiently freeing up resources from services not utilized. Service tweaking has improved this. It's basic I know, but I am still not clear on why he thinks it best to leave it up to windows instead of conciously and intelligently achieving it yourself.

[TimDgsr]

I don't see the logic in this either. If i'm running windows XP, and I have 1GB of memory. Why would I pay for a program to create a ram drive in my memory when I could just shut off the paging file and have it use only my physical memory. Leaving me with all my memory and 0 swap file. Sounds to me like you're putting in a few extra steps to get less performance?

[JigPu]

Because windows never gets rid of the pagefile. One of my friends tried disabling the pagefile, but found out that for some reason there was still swapping going on. Turns out Windows keeps something like a 20MB pagefile, regardless of if you disable it. So, while moving the pagefile to RAM does eliminate the need for a pagefile in the first place, there's no way to actually get rid of the pagefile, meaning there's a possible (slight) performance increase.

Besides, why pay for a ramdisk when there are two or three free ramdisk programs out there? :)
JigPu

[I.M.O.G.]

I don't see the logic in this either. If i'm running windows XP, and I have 1GB of memory. Why would I pay for a program to create a ram drive in my memory when I could just shut off the paging file and have it use only my physical memory. Leaving me with all my memory and 0 swap file. Sounds to me like you're putting in a few extra steps to get less performance?

Maybe read further into the link that xwred gave us, your missing the part of the point that pageing still occurs.

Running a certain program from a ramdrive can increase that programs performance but paging IO will not be improved is the core of the explanation.

It is not as simple as shut off pageing file and then only physical memory is used... The reason why RAMdrives for pagefiles is flawed is more complicated than that.

[TimDgsr]

ah, i was at work and skimmed through it rather quickly, didn't realize there was even a second page to this thread. doh

[Boomstick]

I've always wanted to create a ramdrive big enough for games, so my levels would load instantly. I even would wade through the back alley's of the web looking for a used RocketDrive (http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm). But it was just too expensive and I would probably have to install the game on the Ramdrive everytime my computer was rebooted. Not to mention that games keep using more and more disk space.

[deathstar13]

ok so let me get this str8:
even tho my page file is disabled windows still uses one? but its really small correct?

even with it being so small id doubt im loosing much performance.but id definatly dont want a page file on my hdd.
ive run the ram disk programs before and are nice but can be a pain sometimes also.

[n17ikh]

Another very, very simple free ramdrive setup:

http://www.codeguru.com/Cpp/W-P/system/devicedriverdevelopment/article.php/c5789/

Haven't tested it yet but I'm downloading it to do so. Hopefully I'll be able to install folding and/or seti on it and be able to power down my drives when I'm not at the computer.

EDIT: Works great for me. No bloated programs running in the background to maintain the ramdisk either, it's a Windows driver it loads. :)

[TommyHolly]

OK now you got me interested. OK here is what I am confused about:

1. I have that crappy RAMBUS RDRAM 1066Mhz stuff that you have to buy in pairs. Currently I have only 512 Ram and to upgrade that would cost me more than a new PC. If I get one of these RAM Cards that you install in an open slot. would I have to use the same type of RAM or could I use like PC2700 or something like that?

2. Just to clarify, this RAM card is much faster than using your Hard Drive to swap internet files? If you look at my "Sig" below you'll see what I am running. Would it make a difference over my Hard Drive?

3. This has nothing to do with me but would one of these RAM drives work faster than someone using a RAID 1 or RAID 0 setup on thier harddrive?

[JigPu]

1) The "RAM Cards" AFAIK use only SDR memory. I do not believe I've heard of DDR or Rambus solutions.

2) Theoretically, the card could be as fast as the RAM's rated speed. In real life though, you would be limited by the PCI bus' peak bandwidth of 133MB/sec. Also remember that that's peak bandwidth, so if your HD started using up 40MB/sec of that bandwidth, the card's throughput will slow down.

3) A RAM Drive (unlike a "RAM Card") in all cases will be faster than a RAID 0 setup. Once again, theoreticaly you can achieve a peak bandwidth to the ramdrive equal to that of your memory bandwidth. In practice, this bandwidth is never achieved, though I've personally hit speeds upwards of 300MB/sec on my own system (145x2MHz FSB).

JigPu

[TommyHolly]

What speeds would my PC's Harddrive reach typically? I have a plain old 120MB Dell 7200 RPM HardDrive.

Here is a link to a review on Cenatek's "Rocket Drive". http://www.silentpcreview.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=49&page=1

JigPu, You said that you are getting speeds of 300Mb/Sec? The top speed of the Rocket Drive is 132 Mb/Sec burst... How can you get 3 times that?

[JigPu]

Check out the storage forum (or StorageReview.com) for a better idea, but an average hard drive seems to have a raw transfer rate of about 30-50MB/sec sustained depending on how good it is. Really good drives like the WD Raptor can pull upwards of 50MB/sec sustained.


As for my RAMDrive, the reason it beats the pants off of the Rocket Drive is because I'm not limited by the PCI bus. The Rocket Drive uses RAM modules to store data, and as you know, RAM is very quick at transfering data. So quick in fact, that the limit is not usually the RAM on the Rocket Drive, but the PCI bus it's plugged into. Under perfect conditions, the PCI bus has a theoretical throughput of 132MB/sec (33MHz x 32 bits). Under real conditions, other devices will be using the PCI bus (like your sound card, modem, hard drive, etc) and eating into that bandwidth.

My RAMDrive though exists in system RAM, which sits on an extremely fast bus that can provide just over 2GB/sec (133MHz x 64 bits x 2[DDR]). That bus gets nowhere near saturated, and so my RAM becomes the bottleneck at sustaining only 300MB/sec.

JigPu

[XWRed1]

What you want to do is buy an Opteron box, put ALOT of ram in it, load a 64-bit OS on it, and store a big game like UT2004 in a ramdisk made out of system memory. Then play out of that.

[nahmus]

What you want to do is buy an Opteron box, put ALOT of ram in it, load a 64-bit OS on it, and store a big game like UT2004 in a ramdisk made out of system memory. Then play out of that.

If you're gonna do something like this I'm not sure that it matters what processor is there as long as the OS supports large ram drives and the memory is fast.

[XWRed1]

Using >4gb of ram is very inconvenient on a 32-bit computer.

[JDXNC]

Using >4gb of ram is very inconvenient on a 32-bit computer.


Don't forget Opteron and A64 have ondie memory controller so the latency would be REALLY low.

So I would think that a ram drive on an Opteron/Athlon 64 system should be faster than most other systems.

[TommyHolly]

I guess that I'll wait to do this on my next PC. I am planning to buy my next PC when 64-bit becomes commonplace and I'll make sure I get a ton of RAM so I can load stuff off of it.

[nahmus]

you know after I typed that i was thinking about addressing that much memory. small ramdrives would probably work well but system size drives would probably be a waste.

[Boomstick]

Another very, very simple free ramdrive setup:

http://www.codeguru.com/Cpp/W-P/system/devicedriverdevelopment/article.php/c5789/

EDIT: Works great for me. No bloated programs running in the background to maintain the ramdisk either, it's a Windows driver it loads. :)

I'm trying this as well. Seems great. Surfing is much faster. I didnt think it would be much of an improvement, since I'm using Raptors, but it is significantly faster.
I have a pagefile static at ~1536 (At work now and cant remember the exact number). I tried to set it to 9MB on my 30MB ramdrive (B drive), but everytime I check the pagefile, it shows it is still on my C drive at 1536.

How can I get rid of my old pagefile?
I tried a registry edit that deletes the pagefile at shutdown, but that didnt do it.

[XWRed1]

Don't forget Opteron and A64 have ondie memory controller so the latency would be REALLY low.

So I would think that a ram drive on an Opteron/Athlon 64 system should be faster than most other systems.

Right well, x86 systems besides the amd64 (and I guess ia32e) stuff isn't even really applicable cause you can't even put together a suitably large ramdisk out of system memory on them.


I guess that I'll wait to do this on my next PC. I am planning to buy my next PC when 64-bit becomes commonplace and I'll make sure I get a ton of RAM so I can load stuff off of it.

You can buy one today and put 64-bit Linux on it and it will work just fine. All your apps will be 64-bit. You will have drivers for all your hardware. You can put in gobs of ram and put a bunch of junk into a gigantic ramdisk.