RAM Disk with an SSD?
 

I just added memory to my new laptop (i7 hyper-threaded quad core previously described) bringing it up to 16 gig (and making it the most powerful computer I've ever owned!). I'm trying to think of how to exploit all that extra memory. If I had a regular hard drive, adding a RAM disk and pointing the TEMP environment variables and swap file towards that would be an obvious choice. However, as I have an SSD, would I gain anything? If the difference is di minimus, I won't bother, but if I would get a perceivable performance increase it's probably worth doing. If the latter, how much memory should I grab for the RAM disk?

Lifehacker says a RAMDISK is faster than an SSD.

http://lifehacker.com/5969767/add-a-...sd-performance

I wouldn't use a ramdisk. Windows file cacheing will basically do it for you.

+1 on Loren.

Good use for the power: start playing games. :)

I would second this. The operating system is already going to cache what it thinks it will need. There are certain specific cases where it can make sense, but for most people it's not going to be worth the effort.

Thanks, Loren! (and gfunkdave).

Never been a game player. However, I compose music, edit audio, edit video and edit photographs using a variety of professional level tools (Sonar, Audition, Finale, Sibelius, Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere), all of which love lots of memory, require a powerful CPU and most of which are coded for 64-bit, hyper-threaded, multi-core CPUs. Though most of my work day is spent in Word, Outlook and Acrobat, most of my "play time" will make use of my new Best Friend's power. :)

I have a similar machine (8.0-8.2 Windows index) and haven't bothered with ramdisk or any tuning that I typically needed on my old machine. This weekend I had Lightroom exporting full-res TIFF files, while CS6 was doing a panorama photomerge of 6 photos, while I was working with flash video, and it wasn't breaking a sweat. I've yet to see it use more than 9GB of RAM, and only after I purposely generated multiple smartobject-laden layers.

Just use and enjoy.

Oh, get yourself VMware and start running several different' OS's at once and you'll want to double that measly 16 ;)

Yup. I normally run two VMs, sometimes more. It's quite normal to see the actual memory use hover around 12gb, if I'm doing anything at all heavy in the main system it's going to edge past 16gb. I've only taken it clear up to the 24 I have installed once doing a bunch of video conversion. (I couldn't queue them up so I had several instances running when I walked away from the machine.)

How about Mathematica?:D One of the things you can do with it is image processing.

Image Processing

Mathematica 9 adds many more capabilities to analyze and process two- and three-dimensional images using highly optimized algorithms. Introduction of the interactive Image Assistant, Suggestions Bar, and many more user assistance features helps solve real-world image processing applications, including image classification, feature detection, restoration—all more easily and faster than before.

I haven't found a good RAMdisk driver for Windows; on Linux, I use tmpfs a lot, and it is noticeably faster than SSD for some purposes (compilation and assembling IDE caches, mainly) at least when used with "safe" file system tunings (turning on aggressive write-caching -- "data=writeback,commit=600" on ext4) helps with some of the difference.)

Linux has a much more aggressive than Windows in terms of keeping read cache around rather than free memory by default, which makes it WAY faster for development workloads -- my favorite example was back in 2006 with XP (which was even worse) but Linux inside VMWare Workstation inside Windows actually did builds (ant/java) noticeably faster than Windows on the exact same hardware (no, I don't remember.) Because of that, on read-heavy parts of the workload, the SSD makes a bigger difference on Windows, and I'd imagine that would also make a similar difference with a ramdisk if you could find a good driver for it.

--

I doubt moving \windows\temp or \user\whoever\appdata\local\temp to ramdisk will make much difference unless you have a specific program that you know is doing a lot of writes there.

XP wasn't very good at it but my understanding is that Win 7 is. I do see some pretty massive cacheing going on at times with what I do.

SSD has limited number of writes ;)


As for swap file, it's only used when there is no enough memory; pointless to put it in the RAM :cool:

The Windows NT v6 kernel (Vista, 7, 8) is certainly a lot better than XP was; it's still less aggressive about caching than Linux, and generally slower on some sets of operations with lots of small files.

A limited number of writes that virtually no regular user will see in the useful lifetime of an SSD. There are a few exceptions, but very few people are going to be rewriting the full capacity of the disk several times every day, which is what it would take to wear down the drives in a reasonable amount of time.

We HAVE a truly abusive workload at my work (continuous build and unit tests), which had been running on older Intel SSDs -- pretty much keeping the drives at a significant portion of their write speed all the time during the workday, and some write load 24/7. When we, after about 2 years, started replacing them with newer, faster SSDs, the oldest drives were showing about 25% of their estimated write lifetime remaining via SMART and out of a pool of 16 machines the same age (and 64 total with that model of SSDs although none deployed quite as long) not a single one ever started getting write errors because of running out of spare space.

I think we had a total of 2 drives out of 80 die suddenly, but that's generally assumed to be controller failure which is usually what takes out SSDs.

Yup, at least with Windows. There are some interesting compressed-RAM drivers on Linux which let you use a chunk of compressed RAM as part of the swap, and are sometimes used on Android builds.

Really no reason to have a swap file these days, other than that Windows doesn't behave well without one; I usually shrink it to 1gb.

I know. However, I've been monitoring the projected life of my SSDs (I have them installed in three of my machines) using a variety of software. They'll expire long after the computers they're in have become obsolete.

I guess I'll just have to start running lots of memory-intensive programs all at once. ;)