Ram Drives, do you recommend them?

[Ringy]

If like me you have a 32 bit OS which only recognizes 4 gig of ram ( less than that once windows and devices grab a little slice ) this makes my other 8 gig of ram redundant I did however find a ram disk program that allows me to use the " hidden ram " as a ram disk so now I don't feel so bad about not having a 64 bit OS. It quite happily uses two of my main programs I run and the speed increase is significant. I did try win 8.1 and hated it, it crashed constantly and my screen looked more like a smart phone rather than what I prefer my desktop to look like. Anyway if you have more than 4 gig of ram and you are running a 32 bit OS I would recommend a ram disk for the the use of the ram windows "cant see".

 

[Fayd]

A ram drive is more for temp storage. They are good for situations where you'll need constant or very high I/O. When you restart your computer, it's contents will be gone. You can script certain things to move certain data to it and what not though.

I have a Linux server that has a 16MB ram drive, I have a script that polls data from an arduino device and writes a text file on it every second. Another app reads it at similar intervals. That one file gets tons of I/O. So rather than put that on the hard drive where it may slow things down, or a SSD which has a write limitation, the ram drive is ideal for this.

By default Linux has several ram drives and you can just mount them. They're not big, but you can change it.

In windows you need special software. Not aware of any free ones but I'm sure there's some.

You can do all sorts of cool stuff with them though. What would be interesting is putting a VM on a ram drive to see how fast the guest OS operates.

In simple terms, one does not really recommend/not recommend a ram drive specifically, it's more one of those things you can use if you have a need for it.

AMD puts out a free version that will allocate up to 4gb.

http://www.radeonmemory.com/software_downloads.php

and yes, it works with non-AMD systems.

 

[MongGrel]

No, but gopher it.

 

[SOFTengCOMPelec]

WARNING: This thread is a NECRO now, from about 1.5 years ago.

 

[sonitravel09]

I have been using Ramdrives since 1970s. No harm in tossing a couple gigs up there, then using it as your cache for say Opera or Chromium, which actually does reduce SSD thrashing. Ramdrives worlk very quick and speed up a browser significantly.