Using Ramdisk to store temporary files.

My situation is I recently upgraded to 18GB of RAM (from 6GB), but the version of Windows 7 that I have can only use 16GB. Thinking of ways to fully utilize all of my RAM, a Ramdisk came to mind, but very few good uses for Ramdisks were discovered when doing my searches. The one that caught my attention was storing my temporary files (Windows and Internet Browsers) on a Ramdisk. I use a SSD (has plenty of free space) as a boot drive. I completely "Shut Down" Windows at the end of each day.

Pros: Reduce writing to the SSD. Reduce "junk files" taking up space on SSD. Windows and Browsers will run faster. Reclaims RAM (2GB) that Windows does not recognize. Removes temp files every night when computer shuts down.

Cons: Not sure if temp files are used for long periods of time (multiple days).

1) Should I or shouldn't I create a Ramdisk for temp files for Windows, browsers, or both?
2) How big should the Ramdisk be (keep in mind, it will disappear each night, or not if you think I should save it to disk before "Shutting Down" and restore upon "Boot Up")?

I'm actually curious on this one. How'd you get to 18GB of RAM? 2x8gb+2GB?

he has a question that is of much interest and an idea that sounds good to me.

here is the ram the win 7's can use

For all 32-bit editions of Windows 7, 4GB is the maximum.

For 64-bit editions, Home Premium can use up to 16GB, Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate can use 192GB.

Basically you're using whatever ram disk utility and assigning the partition to accept cache files from the browser. Same as anything else you would do with a ram disk.

Same risks apply, up to you if its actually worth your time. Since you have 18gb, I would think you could use 2gb and still have 16gb of usable ram. 2gb would be PLENTY for all of that stuff.

That might not be possible. Though 18GB of ram sounds intresting... we'll dig into this here.

If not mistaken the OS will take over 16GB of usable Ram. Though even if you try to Ram Disk for temp cache, unless your doing it in the bios level and the OS manages to see it your not going to be able to utilze that extra ram. The OS will physically limit the OS to 16GB, and thats including the Ramdisk made within Windows.

deathman20, so you're saying that the os will not even "see" the 2gig over the 16 gig?

That's how I would predict it as well.

Well that's silly then

My Motherboard is a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 and uses Triple-Channel DDR3. I had three 2GB chips and added three 4GB chips all are 1600MHz. The processor is an I7 960.

16GB is more than enough RAM, I would be fine using only 10GB. I only added extra RAM because I thought a game that I like to play was cramped with 6GB (8GB was recommended).

Would it speed up anything if I created a small Ramdisk (2 to 4 Gigs) to use for Windows and/or the Internet browsers? How large should the Ramdisk be? Should I erase or save the Ramdisk when I shut down.

caddi daddi said:

deathman20, so you're saying that the os will not even "see" the 2gig over the 16 gig?

Click to expand...

Correct. It must be a base version of Win7 as there was a limit on the amount of Ram it would see.

bob4933 said:

Well that's silly then

Click to expand...

Might be but there has been some limitations in consumer editions / even commercial editions of the OS with ram limits.

AnimeMania said:

My Motherboard is a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 and uses Triple-Channel DDR3. I had three 2GB chips and added three 4GB chips all are 1600MHz. The processor is an I7 960.
16GB is more than enough RAM, I would be fine using only 10GB. I only added extra RAM because I thought a game that I like to play was cramped with 6GB (8GB was recommended).
Would it speed up anything if I created a small Ramdisk (2 to 4 Gigs) to use for Windows and/or the Internet browsers? How large should the Ramdisk be? Should I erase or save the Ramdisk when I shut down.

Click to expand...

Aah that makes sense of the odd number of ram. Thanks for the clarification.
Only big downside of RAM Disk is that it will clear it every time you shut down. So cached files on websites, passwords, user logins... it can be helpful on a public computer as its deleted every reset but a private PC it might be more hassle and time consuming than anything.

I really don't think you would gain anything noticeable as you already have an SSD.

like xp not "seeing" over 4 gigs I think it is?

XP not seeing over 4GB isn't an XP problem, it is a 32-bit OS problem. 64bitXP can see up to 128GB of memory

I went and got me the ram disk from amd, the free version, it give me a 4 gig ram drive.
I added 8 gigs of ram for a total of 16 gigs.
I moved my IE temp files and cache to it.
you do have a choice to empty it on every boot or not to.
at that point I remembered playing with this a long time ago and at that time cast it to the side.

after gaming and messing with it for a few hours, I'm back to taking it out.
your whole app has to go on it so that it loads faster, with an ssd it's just not worth the grief.

RAM is faster than SSD, but will you see the difference? I think it would make a great scratch file location for PS. You might be able to set you pagefile there too. You can set some of them to save the ramdisk to the hard drive when you close Windows and have it load back up on restart. It would be a way to reduce SSD thrashing from poorly written software.