I'm in theory going to be wrong somewhere here but I have to ask.

[MongGrel]

So, I have no SSD's on this system and maybe someone had done this before but if you were to say perhaps put your operating system on a larger SSD.

Then had 24Gb of RAM and made two RAMDisk that were 9GB each, could you put those two RAMDisk's in a software RAID0 array running from the main SSD, and effectively have 6 left over for regular RAM to run any program up to that size on the RAMDisk.

I imagine maybe you couldn't put RAMDisks in RAID0 to begin with, or would be worth trying, something I was curious about.

Might be redundant anyways with the speed.

But even the you could perhaps have a smaller SSD in a system to back up the RAMDisks for start up on what you had running on the RAM array.

I've been away for a bit on the forums and pondering thing's lately that might be possible to do more or less.

 

[Automata]

Even if you could put memory in RAID 0, it wouldn't do anything but hurt the speeds. You run RAID 0 across different drives to add their throughput together. Your RAM disks are on the same device: memory. That would be similar to creating two partitions on a single disk and putting them in RAID 0.

Additionally, you'd have the overhead of RAID operations, which would certainly be much slower than it can access RAM.

 

[MongGrel]

Yeah and sorry about the bad spelling in the thread name to begin with, I should have proof read that more, kind of thought something along those lines.

 

[MongGrel]

So basically you could make one RAMDisk of 18 GB and run that with a smaller SSD as a boot backup and still have the OS on a larger one and increase things quite a bit perhaps >

?

 

[MongGrel]

Sorry I shouldn't even started this one.

 

[Automata]

The problem is booting the system and having appropriate space to run the operating system. 18 GB for the OS disk is very small. Even if you could fit the OS in that much space, you wouldn't have a useful amount of space left for anything else.

Secondly, RAM disks are generally managed in the operating system itself, which means the OS is already running when the RAM disk is created. You wouldn't be able to boot from a RAM disk without something managing the RAM before the operating system boots. The OS would also have to know that it can't use the entire memory, otherwise it'd corrupt the disk. You also then have problems with saving the data back to the disk. You wouldn't be able to write updates to the hard drive/SSD because it would be substantially slower than memory. Writes would have to either be periodic sweeps or done when it shuts down.

It wouldn't gain you much. Solid state drives are already very fast. Switching your OS to one will speed up your boot times, but once it is loaded, there isn't much of a difference until other programs start hammering the disk (if it is mechanical). You'd be better off using that spare RAM disk space for programs that have substantial disk usage.

Finally, any modern OS will cache commonly used files in free memory for you, even outside of operating system files. Bottom line is that RAM disks have very limited use.

It is fine to ask questions. How else would we learn?

 

[MongGrel]

Nah I didn't mean the O/S on a Ram disk, would have that on a second larger SSD and run say a game you used often on the RAM disk.

Sorry I wasn't more specific on that one, more thinking out loud last night at the time.