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Ram drive?

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JackNSally

Member
Joined
May 19, 2005
I am currently running 8 gigs of ram and would like to start using a ram drive. Anyone have any recommendations on what program to use? I would prefer something that is free/open source but it doesn't have to be.
 
I tried a few from here a while back. There was one available from Cenatek that was quite nice, but I can't hit their site any longer.
 
I am currently running 8 gigs of ram and would like to start using a ram drive. Anyone have any recommendations on what program to use? I would prefer something that is free/open source but it doesn't have to be.

http://www.dataram.com/products-and-services/ramdisk

This works like a charm.
I have it set for 2.5GB out of my 6. plan to get more ram on my
EVGA X58 for a total of 12GB. 32GB seems way crazy "Using its 50 nm technology, Samsung has made the world’s first 4 Gb DDR3 DRAM chip. "We have leveraged our strength in innovation to develop the first 4Gb DDR3, in leading the industry to higher DRAM densities," said Kevin Lee, vice president, technical marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc." This was posted in January 2009!
 

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How much better performance have you experienced by putting your pagefile onto a ramdisk?

I saw the DataRam Ramdisk. Looks interesting.
http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

But what is this?
http://www10.atwiki.jp/gavotterd/

I had been wanting to use a ram disk for pagefiling for like forever but didnt know it was being done. I am really surprised that after doing a search that there isn't more interest in this. Is there any experience doing this, or is it that this is no longer needed?

Thanks in advance.
 
Putting the pagefile onto a ram-drive won't do any good. You just take away usable ram from the OS.

The exception is if you are using a crippled Windows that doesn't go above 4GB and you have more RAM than that. Using RAM above 4GB for the pagefile will speed it up.
 
Putting the pagefile onto a ram-drive won't do any good. You just take away usable ram from the OS.

The exception is if you are using a crippled Windows that doesn't go above 4GB and you have more RAM than that. Using RAM above 4GB for the pagefile will speed it up.

What is a crippled Windows? You mean like how XP only uses 4gb, but xp can't use over 4gb right? How do you have a crippled xp then, would seem that all xp are crippled...

But what about Vista? I use Vista and have 4gb of memory. I believe I can put 8gb onto this motherboard, so maybe I should upgrade the memory and test out the ramdrive pagefile. But does Vista still use a pagefile?
 
32bit XP/Vista/Win7 cannot use mroe than 4GB because Microsoft made it that way (this is purely a software restriction). Some ram drive software supports memory above 4G, on which you can then place your pagefile.
 
^ Its not a software restriction, its a restriction made by the fact its 32bit which means its can only address 4gbs, but you can often only see 3.25,3.5,3.75 because the memory bandwidth is being taken up by other things on the bus.
 
That is a common misunderstanding. 32bit systems can easily address more than 4GB
 
Yes, PAE is one of those addressing modes. PAE is supported by Windows and is what gives a ram drive easy access to memory above 4G.
 
That is a common misunderstanding. 32bit systems can easily address more than 4GB


I am sorry to say but you are severely mistaken on this part.

A 32-bit address register meant that 2 (power of)32 addresses, or 4 GB of RAM, could be referenced

The emergence of the 64-bit architecture effectively increases the memory ceiling to 2(power of)64 addresses, equivalent to approximately 17.2 billion gigabytes, 16.8 million terabytes, or 16 exabytes of RAM.


it is not easy by any means to get more than 4gb out of a 32 bit OS.
 
It may or may not be easy, but it is done in 32bit server OS (including windows) situations, PAE is one way (if i remember correctly XP32 even has PAE built in but turned off).

64bit processing increases performance (with 64bit os and software, obviously) by 5-10%, and allows very easy access to >4gb ram.
So no, you don't get 64bit performance in 64bit apps. In 32bit apps i would imagine performance is about the same.
 
#15 It does not matter how much a register can hold. Windows is running in paging mode, and thus the physical address is located in a data structure hold in memory. This structure can easily be more than 32 bits wide.

#16 The PAE kernel is there. And since XP/SP2 it is loaded by default.
 
Loaded and unused i guess. That's annoying.

Not that i've ever used even close to the 3gb of ram i actually get to use in xp32, but it's the principle of the thing!


One thing that i've done with a ramdrive that i really like is locate the firefox cache on it (ubuntu has a ramdrive folder by default). If you're a folding type person you never reboot (or rarely) so the cache doesn't get flushed often, and loading pages from a ramdrive cache is fast, essentially instant really.
If you do reboot then firefox has to re-download everything of course.
I haven't worked out how to add a step in the shutdown process to copy the ramdrive to the HDD, and then load it back up when it starts.
That might actually be easier in XP, i think there's a shutdown script somewhere.
 
If you choose the right ram drive software it will save the content for you and reload it on next reboot.
 
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