RAM drive! oh yea.

blue chuzzle

i only recently came across this concept and i cant believe its not talked about more!!

especially by people that are obsessed with speed. now, i accept that memory is expensive, but its reasonably plentyfull at this stage.

what programs do people know about and do they work for them?

i installed quake 3 in mine last night and it was amazing running the entire game from memory. more amazing as a concept i accept, as quake 3 runs at amazing speed on any modern computer.

i know if i stumble across a big wad of money ill be buying a mac pro and loading it with 16 gigs of ram and vista (well, i cant expect to stumble across the money tomorrow!) and installing games into the memory, effectivly eliminating loading times. also putting your web cache in there increases the speed of web browsing hugely. im sure there are hundreds of other uses (photoshop has been mentioned as somthing that would benifit)

memory being at least 100 times faster than hard drives, it has so many applications!

i havent had the chance to think of others in the 24 hours ive known about this.

any suggestions?

NB* obviously when you switch off your system everything gets wiped. this can be good if you have your temp folders there but bad if you forget to transfer stuff to the hard drive. im sure there is, or could easially be, a program that transfers stuff when your shutting down.

Diddy Kong

Is this what you are talking about?? Or is it some program?

blue chuzzle

dbfarrell wrote:

Is this what you are talking about?? Or is it some program?

no, but that is somthing that works on the same principle.

i have no idea why this isnt widespread...

what im talking about is software that takes some of your system memory and makes it appear and function as a hard drive. it appears in explorer as a new hard drive and can be used as such. its advantage is that it is hundreds of times faster than a regular hard drive.

clearly you need to have plenty of ram in the first place to install games etc vut memory is cheap enough these days.

petes

blue chuzzle wrote:

no, but that is somthing that works on the same principle.

i have no idea why this isnt widespread...

what im talking about is software that takes some of your system memory and makes it appear and function as a hard drive. it appears in explorer as a new hard drive and can be used as such. its advantage is that it is hundreds of times faster than a regular hard drive.

clearly you need to have plenty of ram in the first place to install games etc vut memory is cheap enough these days.

Actually dbfarrell is correct. There is no software available (as far as I know) that allows you to take memory from your existing ram and use it as a hard drive. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.




/edit I am wrong. Did a bit of googling.

http://www.farstone.com/software/virtual-hard-drive.htm

Every day is a school day.

blue chuzzle

well, im not asking if its real! thats clear from my first post :P

i thought it was just an amazing thing to discover and i thought i should share with the wider world to see if anyone can come up with good uses for it

i found out about it when bouncing around in wikipedia

ill post the program i got to do it later when i get home, i tried one or 2 but they didnt work.

Eoin Madsen

Ramdrive.sys used to be part of DOS. I would have thought that the concept would be included somewhere in XP Pro. :rolleyes:

bambam

Ramdrive.sys is still around in xp , but it hasn't been worked on for ages I guess. I think there is a limit of a 32MB's in size.

try this instead: http://users.compaqnet.be/cn021945/RAMDisk/ramdiskent.htm
you can grab the eval version, it work's fine, you can ignore the warning messages

We've used this at work for some performance tests of software.

blue chuzzle

nice link,

ill try it later!

Dark Hair

Maybe some one should show the admins this for their server issues

Capt'n Midnight

I've tried ram drives on 2K/XP and just got BSOD's

another option is pcmcia flash drives

iRAM is useful on desktops it pretends to be a hard drive - no drivers needed, data transfer rate is nothing to write home about , but it's equilivant to a hard drive with infinite RPM and no seek time, should be excellent for lots of small files or seaching a database.

mike65

RAM drives used to be advertised heavily in the monthly PC mags 10 years ago when they were being trumpted (by the sellers) as a way to transform the performance of your 133-166 khz machine!

Mike.

Capt'n Midnight

mike65 wrote:

RAM drives used to be advertised heavily in the monthly PC mags 10 years ago when they were being trumpted (by the sellers) as a way to transform the performance of your 133-166 khz machine!

Mike.

LOL
am reminded of those programs that compress programs in memory , they were so bad that they had to give people thier money back.

older versions of windows ( 3.0 ? ) could only use 16MB of ram so setting up a RAM drive and putting your swap file was one way of using more ram, or changing to a later version of Himem.sys too

blue chuzzle

why isnt the data transfer rate huge? i would have thought it would be comparable with the data transfer rate of ram...

there is no seek time, is that the only advantage?

Capt'n Midnight

blue chuzzle wrote:

why isnt the data transfer rate huge? i would have thought it would be comparable with the data transfer rate of ram...

there is no seek time, is that the only advantage?

I was referring to battery backed up iRAM drives made by gigabyte - hardware "RAM" drive. not to sofware RAM drives which are not 100% stable in my experiance.

mukki

check out the demo on this guys ebay add
http://cgi.ebay.ie/GigaByte-i-Ram-DDR-GC-RAMDISK-Hard-Disk-Drive-SATA-PCI_W0QQitemZ270033632764QQihZ017QQcategoryZ16178QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

not a bad price either

i think blue chuzzle should come back in a years time and read this thread again

cregser

^ It's not got a bad price because it doesn't come with the memory - and it's limited to 4GB.

One thing I don't like about it is the 16 hour battery life. After it looses it's data, you'll have to load/install stuff all over again - which would be limited by your HDD, CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive speeds.

If it was possible to keep it powered permenantly (in a low power state) then it would be good - but isn't thay what suspend and hibernate are for?

Advantages: You're Jack Bauer and in for another bad day at the office and you've no time to wait for pesky loading screens. But after 16 hours, the vital terrorist data you extracted from their training camp vanishes with your battery backup...

Capt'n Midnight

mukki wrote:

check out the demo on this guys ebay add
http://cgi.ebay.ie/GigaByte-i-Ram-DDR-GC-RAMDISK-Hard-Disk-Drive-SATA-PCI_W0QQitemZ270033632764QQihZ017QQcategoryZ16178QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

not a bad price either

i think blue chuzzle should come back in a years time and read this thread again

not really that great - it's in Hong Kong - Price: £88.90 + £9.98postage + £1 insurance

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/SATARAID_Cards.html - Price: £83.50 (£98.11 Including VAT at 17.5%)