Ramdisk

Some of you will know all about the option of a Ramdisk, so this is for those that don't know or would be interested in the software and results I have had today.

A Ramdisk is exactly what it implies, a virtual disk drive held in RAM. It's much faster than SSD's even in RAID 0 (and I have 2x Samsung 950 Pro installed in RAID 0). The Ramdisk image can be written to physical disk when you shut down if you want to keep the data held on it. I use it for temporary internet cache, temp files, things that speed up the processes on my laptop. If you have a lot of RAM that's not being used then this is a useful option.

You can create a Ramdisk with the following software (free for non-commercial use).
https://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/

I have 32GB of HyperX RAM on my AW17R3 so I created a 4GB 'R Drive' and named the Volume Ramdisk.

The results below speak for themselves.

 

I have been thinking about trying this out too. I've used ramdisks a long time ago and even tried it again a couple years ago but I didn't want to do anything manually like I had to back then.

I see there are a couple options out there now to load games and do other tasks. I'd like to create a 16GB or 20GB disk to see if I could load an entire game (or parts of it it it's larger than that) and see how much of a noticeable difference that makes in game.

I'm assuming the main thing would be quicker load times. maybe less stuttering from loads on the fly but that may not even be measurable.

It if worked really good, and I felt it made enough difference this would be the only reason I would want to go to 64GB memory. Really 32GB is overkill for me but I always like to err on the side of too much. Most of my games could be loaded into memory fully, with a few of the larger games like GTAV that could not.

 

Hi Porter,

Well the limit on Win10 with the software I posted is only the limit of your RAM size, so 16GB or 20GB is quite possible if you have 32GB of RAM.

Let us know if you go for it and how well it works.

Another benefit for me is the reduced use of the SSD for temporary internet files and temp (junk) files.

 

It seems like a good thing to try. Thanks for sharing the results and tools.

 

@JerseyBoy Have you done any application benchmarking with and without your RAM disk?
My educated assumption is that RAM disk is a waste of time and might actually be to the detriment of system performance for most people.
Not sure you are aware but Windows automatically uses available memory as filesystem cache... and probably does a better job than the user trying to decide what to cache and what not to. For example: according to Task Manager, my machine has 10.6 GB of free memory now, 10.5GB of which is used as a cache. The cache is adjusted automatically to ensure optimal system performance.

Also remember to enable write caching on your SSDs - slightly risky given how often windows 10 crashes but def worth it from the performance standpoint.

 

Hi etern4l,

Disk caching is a waste of time in my specific case, it's because I have 2 x 950 PRO in RAID 0, the data is on disk so fast that the caching is pointless and would slow down the RAID setup. I don't care about windows potentially crashing, it's not done that once yet and if it did then there's always chkdsk /r to check and fix corruption, which I run after any BSOD.

On the Ramdisk, the point is not to speed up files that are sent to the disk, that is the job of the Windows Cache you refer to. The point of Ramdisk is to never send the files to disk, reducing write latency with tiny Internet files, temporary files, etc. This will also extend the life of the SSD or HDD.

 

Well, with write-back cache the latency of writing to the disk is removed..

I'm still quite sceptical.
Yeah, there might be some SDD life extension benefit if the volume of data written is substantial - have you been able to quantify the life extension in your scenario?
Have you run any system benchmarks before and after applying your setup?

 

Hi etern4l,

There will be SSD life extension, it doesn't need to be a huge amount of data but for example some web browsing can put 100MB on disk pretty quickly. Some web video watching where a file is streamed to disk can hit several hundred MB and the file is deleted when the video is ended, so the file is not actually worth having on the SSD. Trawling through images on the web can easily hit hundreds of MB, such as looking through a gallery of music festival images to see if you are in any of the professional shots.

The only benchmarks I have done are the one's in the first post here, showing the Ramdisk is 3x faster than my 950 PRO RAID 0 volume with large sequential r/w, but way faster on 4k files, so it's way faster for web browsing where there are loads of small files.

 

Not necessarily or likely, since - in absence of the RAM disk - such data is likely cached in RAM by the OS anyway. That's why I was curious if you saw any significant performance delta with your solution, in some reasonable benchmark. Of course RAM is faster than NVRAM....

Wrt SSD endurance, mine is rated at 400 TBW, so no need to worry about a GB being written here or there.

 

Hi etern4l,

I can tell you for a fact it is way faster for web browsing, lightning fast, no discernible delay, Windows isn't having the same effect whether it's caching or not.

My SSD's are 950 PRO (same as yours?), as a RAID 0 volume it can take 800TB of writes, but why write stuff to it that does not need to be written to it? That's more writes, more for TRIM to deal with, more overwrites, more energy used by the laptop. I'm not bothered about wearing out the RAM as a future upgrade is always possible if it fails and it would be much easier and cheaper than replacing 2 x 950 PRO with the latest disks if they failed.

Why don't you try it yourself and do some benchmarks? It's a free app

 

Linus did a review about this no much improvement

 

Hi edymola,

I wouldn't use a Ramdrive for gaming, seems like the sellers of that idea are just trying to make money for selling nothing much and hyping it up to sound like it's awesome! Some of the other features might be good for gamers, but that would be a personal preference for each person.

For Web browsing the pages load instantly, even pages like Google images there's no lag. That's where a Ramdrive is best used, not in gaming.

 

Do you have any guides on how can I use the ram disk partition for my web browsing purpose, this is very intriguing and I do have a 32 gb ram and would like to implement it

 

Set up your RAM drive, tell your browser to use that drive/folder for browser cache:

http://www.radeonramdisk.com/files/QuickUseGuide_MovingBrowserCache_V1.pdf


Ignore the Radeon RamDisk tool, scroll down to the bottom for guides on how to move the cache.


There is little to no benefit really. I've done this before and it didn't help much. I went back to using a server in my house for browser cache. If someone in the house watched a youtube video and then by chance i watched i later that night, it would buffer it locally from the server in the house. This saved on bandwidth before i moved to a plan without a cap and sped up web content delivery by at least twice the speed.

I'd suggest reading up on Squid Cache: http://www.squid-cache.org/


It works amazing.