http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

Sounds pretty cool. Money aint a thing. It would give me reason to get unneeded amounts of ram.

Not a big fan of RAM disks outside of server environments, mostly because of the price vs benefit.

You have to take the RAM away from available system RAM, which means to have a reasonably sized RAM disk you'd need at least 24 or 32 GB of RAM (expensive!), most of which is reserved.
The biggest drawback is that each reboot you have to rewrite the contents of the RAM disk to it. This means that a short while after or during Windows boot opening programs or copying files will be even slower than without the disk, even for content that's supposed to be on the disk.
Then, given the performance of current SSDs, smaller programs already open instantaneously, not providing a benefit for those.
Also depending on how the software is written shutting down or rebooting the computer can also slow down significantly because the contents of the RAM disk have to be saved back to the hard disk.
Most of their use cases they claim to speed up are lies, too. It's pointless to create a swap file on a RAM disk to speed up CAD, browsing, video editing, etc. when you could store the data in your system RAM in the first place. Of course you need an application that is programmed to use large amounts of RAM, if available, but modern software usually supports that.
Additionally, the advantage of no wear is nonsense for cases where your number of (re-)boots + shutdowns is higher than the times you're going to access your data. Every boot it's mandatory to read the contents of the RAM disk from a hard disk and changes will be written back during shutdowns.

RAM disks are most useful when some time after boot you want to open a large program or load levels in games. And of course, which is their most common use, for having lightning fast access to a large data base which is accessed by tons of users.

There's a ton of freeware programs around that can create RAM disk as well. Example (no idea if it's any good):
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Hard-Disk-Utils/RAM-Disk.shtml#download

As a sidenote, RAM can be frozen and read out too, making data theft very possible if someone is commited enough.

Ah, RAMDisk. There's a name I haven't heard in a while. I can't believe they have payment tiers for larger than 1GB of space. You may want to look into something like ImDisk or SoftPerfect RAM Disk as free alternatives (or RapidDisk for Linux). If you have a recent Samsung SSD, they come with RAPID mode support, which functions as a RAM drive cache.

Your operating system already caches things in RAM: that's what it's there for. Storage is for non-volatile memory, and if you want to use a RAM caching solution for it, you would still have the bottleneck of copying the data over to your hard drive, which has to occur sometime. The only real benefit is that you can force things to stay in memory, which may be useful if you're handling a large piece of content (which will be speedy), but for the majority of users, it's more a novelty than a useful feature.

If you want a fast storage solution, get the 950 Pro.

But if you really want it, at the very least you should first invest in a UPS, because losing power suddenly with a RAM drive is disastrous.

More specifically, if you lose power for more than a split second, you'll irrecoverably lose everything stored in the RAM disk.

Interestingly at work with our routers though, I found that remnants of data could persist in RAM for up to 6 seconds after power off; although that's after power off the unit as a whole, no idea what is going on internally. The content would start to degrade, but it was still possible to read some structure if you turned the device on again within 6 seconds. Note that this was just an experiment I was doing writing garbage to RAM and reading it back; it would be corrupted after a second, and the corruption steadily increased up to around 6 seconds where it would become completely corrupt.

Read a review showing the intel 750 series is way better. Has superior speed during high queue dpeths. whatever that means. It just boots slowly because of its firmware, which is supposed to be getting fixed.

Once again, all of these benchmarks showing one SSD is 10% faster than another is pretty irrelevant.

It might mean your program loads in 2 seconds instead of 2.1 seconds. It won't make any real impact on your life or day to day business.

Instead, focus on price, size and brand reliability.

I've put entire installs of AAA games on my RAM disk to see if I can speed up load times but there's not much of a gain from my SSD. It could be that my RAM's relatively slow, being DDR3 and all, but I doubt it. I will say that FARLAP runs so much faster when handling large amounts of text when put on a RAM disk though.

Amazingly enough, servers can have special RAM sticks that have an SSD connected directly to them with an integrated battery designed to offload the RAM's contents onto the drive in the event of a power loss.

Depends on the usage. For a consumer drive, IOPS is more important than deep queue performance, which is where the 950 excels. For a server where you'd have many concurrent requests to the hard drive, the 750 would shine.

It's a bit more than 10%... It would load a program in 0.5 seconds instead of 2.1 seconds. It would copy a 10GB file in 7.5 seconds instead of 27 seconds. These seem like real impacts to me.

That's really bizarre to me; the reason it doesn't handle large text files very well (as I understand it) is because the WPF textboxes aren't designed efficiently for large text blocks (which makes it render it all in the UI even if the text isn't visible). I wouldn't have thought it's an IO issue that a RAM drive would fix.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 3 2015, 1:05 am by Roy.

That's not a fair comparison. You're comparing different interface technologies. Modern SSDs all come close to the physical limit of SATA speeds, so if you compare SATA SSDs most of the time you really get just 10% difference.

Additional software? For this? Shaking my head. Linux has you covered.


Done.

Add the appropriate entry to your /etc/fstab if you want it mounted on boot.

Alternatively, you could put a filesystem on /dev/ram[0-9]+ and mount that, but it's easier to just let the OS manage this for you.

My precise point is that it's comparing apples to oranges.

Good, then we all seem to be on the same page. You just made it look like Lanths advice would've been bad.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Dec 3 2015, 11:53 pm by NudeRaider.

And, as I said, if an SSD is only 10% faster than another, then don't judge your buying decisions on that.

Being 200% faster is of course different, and a subject about which I made no statement.