Is RAM Disk worth it?

[Ikaruga]

Yeah, I know this thread is old, but I believe I've found a benefit to Ram Drives that will be useful to some people. Those with newer Nvida gfx cards will have access to ShadowPlay (or whatever they're calling it now) to record their game sessions. I haven't done any benchmarking, but I think it safe to assume that recording video in real-time while playing triple A titles, especially at 4k resolutions, is going to demand a lot from your HD or SDD. So I've set mine up so that the temp files, which are the real-time recordings, use a Ram Disk. When you're done recording, ShadowPlay copies the temp files to a different (permanent) location of your choosing. I use the MSI Ramdisk that was developed for my class of motherboard. I have 32gb of mem clocked at 3,000mhz, so I set the Ram Disk to use 6gb and so far it's working like a charm.

I wonder how many Mbps / sec do you need, because I found SSDs to be up to the job and fine for recording with Shadowplay.

 

[Raybo58]

no.not really. everyone i have known who tries it out, ends up saying the same things after a week or so...."i disabled/uninstalled it, i just got tired of it after a while."especially if you have an SSD.

Is it possible that "Everyone you have known" were unable to conceive of any practical applications? "Getting tired" of something doesn't really give us any useful information. I just elaborated on a situation where it works beautifully.

The author of this article says that their studies showed "write speeds for a RAM drive were an average of 4.5 times faster than the built-in SSD and read speeds were 6.3 times faster."...
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/ram-drives-faster-ssds-5-things-must-know/

In an era where yearly gains in computer tech result in systems that are at most 5 to 10 percent faster that the previous year, a solution that results in gains that are 500% faster than the fastest existing tech seems worth investigating.

 

[Raybo58]

I wonder how many Mbps / sec do you need, because I found SSDs to be up to the job and fine for recording with Shadowplay.

It may be that your system has little trouble keeping up. My suggestion was for those whose systems may be struggling. In any event, we know that SSDs are subject to eventual failure in direct proportion to how much activity they are subjected to. So why not preserve their value by reducing the strain? Especially when the solution is extremely simple and, in most cases, free.

 

[eidairaman1]

Is this detectable in real world or only through benchmarks?

 

[LightningJR]

I tried a ram drive with Space Engine since the game has tens of thousands of files and streams in different qualities of textures the closer you get to a planet. It was pretty clear there was a possibility of a large improvement but going from an SSD to the ram drive did nothing to improve the texture streaming.

I also used it for a Minecraft server (with MANY mods) and this also was a situation where it didn't do anything, the SSD performed the same.


I assume the coding of these things comes in to account. Only when the game/app/etc is coded properly to take advantage the massive speeds of a ram drive is when it might really help but in the two cases I tried results were disappointing.



Massive image editing would benefit from a ram drive, I know situations and jobs where it would speed up productivity. The thing is the $1k+ programs will usually have the "load projects to ram" option built in anyway making a separate program to create a ram drive moot.

 

[eidairaman1]

I tried a ram drive with Space Engine since the game has tens of thousands of files and streams in different qualities of textures the closer you get to a planet. It was pretty clear there was a possibility of a large improvement but going from an SSD to the ram drive did nothing to improve the texture streaming.

I also used it for a Minecraft server (with MANY mods) and this also was a situation where it didn't do anything, the SSD performed the same.


I assume the coding of these things comes in to account. Only when the game/app/etc is coded properly to take advantage the massive speeds of a ram drive is when it might really help but in the two cases I tried results were disappointing.



Massive image editing would benefit from a ram drive, I know situations and jobs where it would speed up productivity. The thing is the $1k+ programs will usually have the "load projects to ram" option built in anyway making a separate program to create a ram drive moot.

Youre better off running a RAID of SSDs. The performance gains in Ramdisk are miniscule, especially if you have 8GB+ ram.

 

[notb]

As for the "real world" difference - that's really very dependent on what one is doing.
At this point I'm still running a PC without SSD, so the difference between RAM and HDD is tremendous.

But again: installing software (games?) on DDR is cumbersome (somehow more sensible on Linux thanks to easier scripting).
I've had mixed results with moving files - e.g. photos when editing. It's often difficult to force software to keep temporary files in the RAMdisk. Therefore it could happen that the edited file is in RAM and is read/written quickly, but all operations between are happening on a disk.
However, if you succeed in keeping the whole workflow in the RAMdisk (e.g. when you write the code yourself), you'll notice the difference - even compared to mainstream SSDs.

 

[Ikaruga]

It may be that your system has little trouble keeping up. My suggestion was for those whose systems may be struggling. In any event, we know that SSDs are subject to eventual failure in direct proportion to how much activity they are subjected to. So why not preserve their value by reducing the strain? Especially when the solution is extremely simple and, in most cases, free.

Any SSD you buy nowadays will be utterly obsolete and small way before you would start seeing nand failures. I recommend you give that RAM to Windows instead of spending it on a ram drive (or give it to Shadowplay, and let it save more seconds into memory).

In the early days of DOS and Windows times, ram drives had a good use for many different scenarios, but nowadays, modern operating systems and applications can use and do appreciate the more ram as cache or whatever else they might need the ram for. Ram drives can also create unwanted page faults and cache misses, so they can make things even worse in some cases.
I understand that you are trying to help, but this is just a discussion and I have a different opinion

 

[notb]

Any SSD you buy nowadays will be utterly obsolete and small way before you would start seeing nand failures. I recommend you give that RAM to Windows instead of spending it on a ram drive (or give it to Shadowplay, and let it save more seconds into memory).

In the early days of DOS and Windows times, ram drives had a good use for many different scenarios, but nowadays, modern operating systems and applications can use and do appreciate the more ram as cache or whatever else they might need the ram for. Ram drives can also create unwanted page faults and cache misses, so they can make things even worse in some cases.

For me the most important "scenario" is still simply utilizing a boost in data transfers. Even if you have a PCIe SSD with read/write speeds around 1GB/s, RAM drive will be 10x faster.

As for SSD failures:
What you said is obviously true for typical users (multimedia, games, office tasks).
This is NOT true in general.
Lets assume an average consumer SSD available today can write ~1PB and will be used for 3 years. That gives around 1TB a day.
Obviously, that is A LOT. There exist people that won't write as much data in their life (intentionally, so putting aside cache).

Some people can easily write 1TB a day because of a hobby, a home office activity etc. There is a vast number of ways you can use a PC - some stressing the hardware a lot more than gaming (even with shadowplay...).
Even in large companies, enterprise-grade SSDs (with much better lifetime) are used only in servers. You won't find them in high-end business laptops by default.

 

[Arjai]

I found that while Crunching for WCG, a while ago, that a particularly hard project, hard as in using lots of resources, ran better with a dedicated Ram Disk.

Took a while to toy with it so things all ran smooth, considering I am dealing with only 8Gigs. In the end, it helped run that project on my Laptop about 15% quicker, Rough, VERY rough, estimate. It also saved a bunch of writes to disc, due to checkpoints. So, it did extend my SSD's life a little.

Just my two cents on this.

 

[kn00tcn]

Yeah, I know this thread is old, but I believe I've found a benefit to Ram Drives that will be useful to some people. Those with newer Nvida gfx cards will have access to ShadowPlay (or whatever they're calling it now) to record their game sessions. I haven't done any benchmarking, but I think it safe to assume that recording video in real-time while playing triple A titles, especially at 4k resolutions, is going to demand a lot from your HD or SDD. So I've set mine up so that the temp files, which are the real-time recordings, use a Ram Disk. When you're done recording, ShadowPlay copies the temp files to a different (permanent) location of your choosing. I use the MSI Ramdisk that was developed for my class of motherboard. I have 32gb of mem clocked at 3,000mhz, so I set the Ram Disk to use 6gb and so far it's working like a charm.

what? shadowplay's whole point is low enough bitrates, divide the bitrate by 8 & you get the byte speed, compare that to your drive's specifications or personal benchmarks... so what is the max bitrate that you can set in shadowplay?

i run fraps on old computers, laptops, etc... even at half resolution 60fps, it's still bloated over 200mbit (25mbytes/s), yet is fine for mechanical drives, all these modern *264 type encoders can do low bitrates well below fraps peak since fraps is pseudo-lossless

during the titanfall2 free weekend, i was playing the game on the laptop AND fraps recording to the laptop drive AND (unthrottled max speed) copying other recordings from it to a usb3 drive, now that is some serious mechanical i/o load that didnt even ruin the experience

the demand for a single game with gpu accelerated recording is so low on drives, the only good reason is to not wear out SSDs

 

[Papahyooie]

I still say we should try using a custom bootloader to load the OS into ram, and Raid0 that with another ramdisk. You double your ram speed that way.

 

[notb]

I still say we should try using a custom bootloader to load the OS into ram, and Raid0 that with another ramdisk. You double your ram speed that way.

There are Linux distributions preconfigured for running in RAM - it can't be much easier than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_that_run_from_RAM
IMO the observable (empirical) gain in smoothness is minimal even compared to modern HDDs.
There are some benefits if you frequently execute some programs - e.g. I use sed/grep a lot, but things like this can usually be boosted by better code design. In Linux many things are cached in RAM anyway.

 

[Papahyooie]

There are Linux distributions preconfigured for running in RAM - it can't be much easier than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_that_run_from_RAM
IMO the observable (empirical) gain in smoothness is minimal even compared to modern HDDs.
There are some benefits if you frequently execute some programs - e.g. I use sed/grep a lot, but things like this can usually be boosted by better code design. In Linux many things are cached in RAM anyway.

Yea but windows has the cool software raid0, and you have to load the OS before you can use that. So load windows into ram, boot from that, setup another ramdisk, raid0 it with the first ramdisk, and you basically have the fastest computer in the world. Probably boot up in microseconds.

 

[dont whant to set it"']

Yea but windows has the cool software raid0, and you have to load the OS before you can use that. So load windows into ram, boot from that, setup another ramdisk, raid0 it with the first ramdisk, and you basically have the fastest computer in the world. Probably boot up in microseconds.

Sounds fishy like some free electricity ads in wich one plugs a male end of a cavle into socket and the other end of the cable with (guess wich connector type), another [SOILER="male connector[/SPOILER], in another socket.

 

[notb]

Yea but windows has the cool software raid0, and you have to load the OS before you can use that. So load windows into ram, boot from that, setup another ramdisk, raid0 it with the first ramdisk, and you basically have the fastest computer in the world. Probably boot up in microseconds.

Maybe, but what for? Booting time - seriously?

And you'll have to move the whole Windows to RAM, which will take you a few seconds. W10 will boot up in under 10 seconds if you ask politely.

Anyway, Windows is pretty big, so if you'd like to make it really smooth (as in: without a disk swap and with essential software in RAM as well), you'll need a lot of RAM.

Linux works here a lot better, because you'll easily find a distribution needing less than 2 or 3 GB - even with some tools and files to work with.

I just thought about something else: running an OS in a VM in RAM. That's worth trying.

 

[Papahyooie]

Sounds fishy like some free electricity ads in wich one plugs a male end of a cavle into socket and the other end of the cable with (guess wich connector type), another [SOILER="male connector[/SPOILER], in another socket.

Ok, ok, I'll stop. My humor here is getting dangerously close to trolling...

Yes, I know it's fishy. Also impossible because you can't software raid the windows boot disk from within windows.

I originally thought of the gag when this thread was a little older (scroll back a bit, you'll see it) when people were saying to put your pagefile on a ramdisk. A silly idea, as a pagefile is designed to swap memory out of ram and onto a swap file on the hard disk. If you have enough hard faults that you need a faster page file, then you need more ram. If you have enough ram to put your pagefile on a ramdisk, then you won't need a pagefile (excepting that windows basically requires one) and you won't have enough hard faults for it to affect speed in any way.

I just decided to come up with a sillier solution...

Also, please don't plug a double male cable into two sockets. That doesn't get you free electricity... that gets you dead in a fire.