AMD Radeon RAMDisk

Give your PC a boost with AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk
October 10th, 2012Natasha SampsonGraphics

AMD Pitches Free RAMDisk Trial
1:30 AM - October 11, 2012 by Wolfgang Gruener - source: AMD

AMD Radeon RAMDisk Configuration Utility_01 by davidc646, on Flickr



I gave this a try. Read/write load times didn't really feel any faster than my 830 while loading/playing minecraft or driving sim 2011 ("seat of the pants feel"). I was able to use 4GB out of my Total 8GB RAM. I was plugged in and on battery at times. Maybe I need to increase capacity and file transfer size?

However, I ran AS SSD and got these results:


RD 4GB NTFS_2x4GB CV DDR3-1600_01 by davidc646, on Flickr


Samsung 830 256GB SATAIII_01 by davidc646, on Flickr


Samsung 470 128GB SATAII_01 by davidc646, on Flickr

My RAM benchs as fast as some SSDs in RAID0! Interesting. The RAMDisk benchmarks a lot faster than my SSDs in SATAIII. But its capacity is so small, whatever I want on there has to be pretty small (4GB!) unless i increase my RAM capacity. I can't afford to right now (im broke) and the max i could probably use right now would be upto 2x8GB of DDR3 1600 RAM. Maybe I could use my 4GB for caches or scratch disks, but otherwise I probably won't use it too often unless i have a specific reason. If the app stays updated and bug free, I'd consider buying it.

I am going to try using a minecraft server on the ramdisk.

Would this impact my iGPU much?

EDIT: I learned that RAMDisk is actually by dataram. The AMD version is almost exactly the same.

 

RAMDisk; a good way to make a good system bench like a great system but actually work worse than a 'bad' system.

Not worth the time, effort or money for most systems/workloads.

Win7x64 HP+ or Win8x64 Pro will support and use physical RAM much better than a RAMDisk will in varied workloads (i.e., a normal usage scenario) no matter what benchmark 'scores' indicate.

Advice: skip this (if you need a fast and stable system).

 

Thanks for the pointers tiller. I was a little late to discovering this.

 

I'd always thought RAMdisks were risky at best. Unbuffered DDR3 RAM is very sensitive to hard faults caused by stray radiation, cosmic rays, electromagnetic interference etc with no means of correction. This problem is magnified the more RAM arrays you deploy at a given time, the RAMdisk presupposes you store everything on there so the amount of soft errors and corruption builds up much faster than non-volatile storage. I would not trust a RAMdisk unless it was deployed on Registered ECC ram with Buffering.

 

Cosmic rays?

Surely, we must be talking about TB RAM installations for these issues to be even considered?

For the (up to) 32GB RAM capacities we have currently with our mobile platforms, this isn't even on the radar...

 

My concern is mostly with system uptime and the cumulative effect. Most usage patterns are Non-volatile->RAM for relatively brief usage of relavent data->non volatile. I'm concerned that with a RAM disk, its Non-volatile->permanent storage in RAMdisk->copied to be remembered in non-volatile. It certainly opens your application to hard errors which I think is quite frequent according to google's recent data, I'll dig it up sometime. The faulty app is then remembered back to the non-volatile, therefore the errors are cumulative. Whereas, I think most non-volatile systems have adopted some kind of ECC, especially quality SSDs.

 

This look like a direct port from dataram ramdisk with AMD branding, meaning AMD really have nothing to do withe the program but joint promotions.
As OP says, probably good for a scratch disk or temp file sort of thing. Loading APP on it not particular useful cause you need to load the image on it everytime you restart.

 

If a computer can stay in sleep mode (RAM powered and holding data) for days without data corruption, I'm not worried about a stray "cosmic ray" or two. It's really a non-issue, and the lack of sleep-mode failures proves it.

 

Although I don't use sleep mode at all, I do agree with your points.

Cosmic Rays be damned.

 

So if I'm planning to bring my laptop into a reactor compartment this whole RAMdisk thing is a bad idea?

 

I got these two errors during my use (forgot to upload these).


Error_Could not open device_AS SSD_01 by davidc646, on Flickr
This caused the data for "Lesen Zugriffszeit -.---ms" not to appear here:

RD 4GB NTFS_2x4GB CV DDR3-1600_01 by davidc646, on Flickr

=========


Error_Unable to stop Radeon RAMDisk_01 by davidc646, on Flickr
I couldn't stop the RAMDisk, so i rebooted. It worked after that but i think this might happen again, I just dont remember exactly how i triggered it.

 

Perhaps, some of the radiation is certainly capable of ionizing some of the DRAM bits thus inducing soft errors.

 

This guy did a nice post on RamDisks

The easy - and free - way to create and use a RAMdisk

 

If I remember the math correctly (a co-worker did the work about 4 years ago) there is evidence that a circa-2008 stick of 4GB RAM would experience a bit flip at least once per day (radiation, hardware error, etc). It's also statistically probable that the bit flipped would reside in unused memory (hence no ill effect). That said the more the RAM is utilized the more likely an extraneous failure will affect a bit in data space (leading to potential data corruption) or in program space (leading to potential system instability). ECC RAM exists for a reason (it dramatically reduces the probability that a bit-flipping event would actually result in corrupted data thanks to correction algorithms), and some of the electronics systems in aviation and defense take advantage of even more layers of protection. Just FYI.

For consumers it is pretty much a non-issue .

 

pressing 'ctrl + S' > cosmic rays

.....just saying

 

I use ramdisks since 2008. nothing to see here really. just a new program to do among dozens of others. nothing more.