# RAMDisks Roundup and testing



## Brokenstorm

Currently working on RAMDisks Roundup and testing v2.
All further updates will be in the new thread.

Wasn't sure whether to post this in the storage or memory section, but I guess it makes most sense here.

For the past couple of years I been interested in and running a RAMDisk, but to my great frustration it has been really hard to find any kind of performance testing of RAMDisks. Most of what you find is superficial at best if not downright misleading.

So with the goal of coming up with some sort comprehensive testing of RAMDisk I thought I would start by finding as many RAMDisk software as I can and make a short evaluation of each of them. Then perhaps, as a community, will could come to some kind of consensus as to how to test them.

Keep in mind that many of those program can only create a Direct-IO Disk, which means benchmarks such as HDTune and HDTach will not be able to see those disks. Other benchmarks such as AS SSD often have erratic behavior when testing RAMDisks and will frequently crash. So as you can see finding good benchmark tools for testing RAMDisks might be problematic.

As far as performance testing goes, I intend to test as many variables as I can to see their impact on performance (if any), but I will limit my tests to only 64bit OS. I'm still finalizing my list but coming up with a testing method that's more than just running CrystalDiskMark on each RAMDisk and calling it a day is more pressing right now.

Downsides of RAMDisks should also be kept in mind. Since data on RAMDisks are volatile backup option are useful, unfortunately some program only offer to backup on shutdown (leaving you SOL in case of a crash) other offer even less options (if they have them at all). Backup options might not be useful to every usage pattern but it's never a bad thing to have them.
Also RAMDisks have an impact on CPU utilization, most of them will peg 1 core at 100% when operating at peak performance.

With all that said, if you notice any mistakes or oversight let me know and I will rectify them. Now let's move on to listing all the RAMDisks that I was able to run on Win7 64bit (in alphabetical order).

*ArchiCrypt Ramdisk*

Version: 3.9.1.4216
Source: http://www.archicrypt.de/archicrypt_ultimate_ram_disk.html
File systems: FAT/FAT32
Size: 5MB-32GB
SCSI Disk: No
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 6
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot, Periodic Backup (at interval)

Price: 24,95 €, evaluation version available
Notes: Software is in German only

*Bond Disc*

Version: 1.40
Source: http://www.bonddisc.com
File systems: FAT
Size: 1MB-640MB
SCSI Disk: No
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 1
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot, Periodic Backup (at interval)

Price: Free
Notes: Unsigned driver
Development has stopped

*Buffalo Ramdisk*

Version: 3.2.5.0
Source: http://buffalo.jp/download/driver/memory/ramdisk.html
File systems: FAT/FAT32
Size: 32MB-32GB+
SCSI Disk: No
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 1
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot, Synchronous Backup, Backup when idle

Price: Free
Notes: Requires reboot to change disk size or enable/disable

*Dataram RAMDisk*

Version: 4.1.0.RC25
Source: http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk
File systems: FAT/FAT32/RAW
Size: 5MB-64GB
SCSI Disk: Yes
Direct-IO Disk: No
Max # of RAMDisk: 1
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot, Synchronous Backup, Periodic Backup (at interval)

Price: $18.99 USD, free version available (limited to 4GB or 6GB with Radeon Memory)
Notes: Requires .NET Framework 4

*Gavotte Ramdisk*
Version: 1.0.4096.2
Source: http://www.chweng.idv.tw/swintro/ramdisk.php
File systems: see notes
Size: see notes
SCSI Disk: see notes
Direct-IO Disk: see notes
Max # of RAMDisk: see notes
Backup Options: see notes

Price: Free
Notes: A 64bit compatible version is available but i haven't been able to get it (Chinese forum)
http://bbs.et8.net/bbs/showthread.php?t=853020

*Gilisoft RAMDisk*

Version: 5.1
Source: http://www.gilisoft.com/product-ramdisk.htm
File systems: FAT/FAT32/NTFS
Size: 1MB-32GB+
SCSI Disk: No
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 1
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown/Sleep, Load on Boot, Synchronous Backup, Periodic Backup (at interval)

Price: $39.95 USD, 14 days trial available
Notes: Unsigned driver

*Gizmo Drive*

Version: 2.7.9
Source: http://arainia.com/software/gizmo/overview.php?nID=4
File systems: FAT/NTFS
Size: 3MB-4GB
SCSI Disk: No
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 26
Backup Options: None

Price: Free
Notes: If you enter a capacity above 4GB the RAMDisk will be modulo(4GB) instead
Documentation is scarce
Program seems to be abandonware

*ImDisk*

Version: 1.7.1
Source: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk
File systems: RAW
Size: 1MB-32GB+
SCSI Disk: No
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: No Limit
Backup Options: Manually only

Price: Free, open source
Notes: Configure through command line or control panel

*Passmark OSFMount*

Version: 1.5.1013
Source: http://www.osforensics.com/tools/mount-disk-images.html
File systems: RAW
Size: 1MB-32GB+
SCSI Disk: No
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 26
Backup Options: Manually only

Price: Free
Notes: Based off ImDisk
Crashes if it can't assign a drive letter

*Primo Ramdisk Ultimate*

Version: 5.6.0
Source: http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-ramdisk/download.html
File systems: FAT/FAT32/NTFS
Size: 1MB-1TB
SCSI Disk: Yes
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 128
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot, Synchronous Backup, Periodic Backup (at interval)

Price: $69.95 USD, 30 trial available
$49.95 USD for Professional Edition (32GB limit)
$29.95 USD for Standard Edition (8GB limit)
Notes:

*RamPhantomEX*

Version: 1.0.0
Source: http://www.iodata.jp/product/soft/speed/ramphantomex/
File systems: FAT/NTFS
Size: 1MB-32GB+
SCSI Disk: No
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 2 (possible limitation of the evaluation version)
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot, Synchronous Backup, Backup when idle

Price: ￥2,980, evaluation version available
Notes: Software is in Japanese
256MB limit on the evaluation version

*SoftPerfect RAM Disk*

Version: 3.3.3
Source: http://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/
File systems: FAT/FAT32/NTFS/RAW
Size: 1MB-32GB+
SCSI Disk: No
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 26+
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot, Periodic Backup (at interval)

Price: Free
Notes:

*StarWind RAM Disk*

Version: 5.6
Source: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/high-performance-ram-disk-emulator
File systems: FAT/FAT32/RAW
Size: 8MB-32GB+
SCSI Disk: Yes
Direct-IO Disk: No
Max # of RAMDisk: 26+
Backup Options: None

Price: Free
Notes:

*SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus*

Version: 11.7.1007
Source: http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/ramdisk.php
File systems: FAT/FAT32/NTFS/exFAT/UDF
Size: 1MB-512GB
SCSI Disk: Yes
Direct-IO Disk: No
Max # of RAMDisk: 99
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot

Price: $79.95 USD, 14 days trial available
$59.95 USD for RamDisk version (no Backup Options, max of 1 RAMDisk)
Notes:

*VSuite Ramdisk Server*

Version: 4.6.7531.1240
Source: http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/vsuite-ramdisk/download.html
File systems: FAT/FAT32/NTFS/RAW
Size: 1MB-2048TB
SCSI Disk: Yes
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 128
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot, Synchronous Backup, Periodic Backup (at interval)

Price: $119.00 USD
Notes: Superseded by Primo Ramdisk, only Server edition remains available

*WinRamTech (QSoft)*

Version: 5.3.2.14
Source: http://winramtech.hostei.com/RAMDriv
File systems: FAT/FAT32/NTFS/exFAT
Size: 1MB-64GB
SCSI Disk: No
Direct-IO Disk: Yes
Max # of RAMDisk: 1
Backup Options: Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot, Synchronous Backup, Periodic Backup (at interval/fixed times)

Price: 25$USD (free updates), free version available (expires every 4 months)
12$USD (no updates)
Notes: Can't disable the RAMDisk without uninstalling the driver or disabling it in device manage (requires reboot)
Configurable through the device manager

Wow, that took longer than expected








Anyway, I'll start looking for some suitable benchmark tools, but I'd appreciate your feedback.


----------



## Brokenstorm

*Testing Methodology & Results*

I'm going to try to detail my testing methodology as much as I can, so to make it easier for other people to run their own tests and compare results.

*Test System Setup*
CPU Intel Core i7-920 @ 3.6GHz
Motherboard Asus P6T
Memory 36GB (3x4+3x8) DDR3-1600 (10-10-10-27)
Hard Drive OCZ RevoDrive
Graphics Card AMD Radeon HD 7970 @ 1050/1500
Operating System Windows 7 Pro x64 (fully updated with latest drivers)

The only major tweaks I did were to disable the pagefile, hibernation and superfetch in order to keep results as constant as I can.

Most of the information about how different RAMDisks handle memory allocation was made available by the tools at sysinternals. If you want to get a more in depth understanding of the inner working of windows I highly recommend you try those tools.

RAMDisk memory allocation types:
Paged Pool: Kernel-allocated memory backed by RAM or the paging file.
Nonpaged Pool: Kernel-allocated memory always backed by RAM, has large-page support. Require a block of contiguous memory.
Driver Locked: Memory allocated by a driver and always backed by RAM.
Process Private: Backed by RAM or the paging file.

*Tests*
I'll run 2 set of tests, one with a small RAMDisk (suitable for browser cache), the other with a large RAMDisk (suitable for loading games)
-4GB (128MB for RamPhantomEX, 640MB for Bond Disc)
-30GB (except Bond Disc, Dataram RAMDisk, Gizmo Drive, RamPhantomEX)

Shutdown/Boot times:
-Measured manually and as reported by the Performance Monitoring events
-Each boot is repeated twice and the average is taken as the result
-I've set up a Task Scheduler to open the Event Viewer on a Diagnostics-Performance event. The system remains idle until the Event Viewer opens.
-I'll run a this test for each size with an empty and a full image (for programs that allow load on boot)

Load/Unload times:
-I'll test the creation and load time for 4GB and 30GB RAMDisk. The timer will stop when windows explorer detects the drive.
-For unload time the timer stops when windows explorer can't detect drive.
-All of these test are worst case scenario. For example, a 4GB RAMDisk will be filled then unloaded. A note will be added mentioning the performance when no changes are made to the image.
-I'll only measure those where it makes sense. (A program that doesn't allow backups won't have value for image load/unload)

Game Load Times:
-Path of Exile: Open the game and use every waypoint of act 1 and 2 starting from act 3.
Timer starts when opening the game and stops when the last zone is loaded.

*Default Results*
Run 1
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2848ms--19643ms--49s
PoE: 2m48.24s

Run 2
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2697ms--18656ms--45s
PoE: 2m38.69s

*Results*
*ArchiCrypt Ramdisk*
Memory allocation: Process Private (backed by RAM and handled by a service)

4GB (FAT32)

30GB (FAT32)

NTFS results were slightly slower but still very similar.

Shutdown/Boot times (The trial version doesn't allow to load a RAMDisk on boot, so add the image creation/load time to get an approximation)
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2766ms--18535ms--47s
4GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3427ms--18233ms--46s
4GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 25578ms--18233ms--68s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 4814ms--18462ms--47s
30GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 33209ms--18347ms--77s
ATTENTION!!! Since ArchiCrypt runs as a service it is subject to the WaitToKillServiceTimeout. Meaning that if it isn't done doing whatever it's doing by that time Windows simply kills it. Meaning say goodbye to your data because it's gone (at least what hasn't been saved yet).

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 4.11s--0.88s
4GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 25.71s--23.61s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 8.07s--0.88s
30GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 2m54.48s--2m47.36s
Images are always the size of the RAMDisk they are associated to.
Empty images take as long to load as full ones.
When no changes are made to an image, unload times are the same as volatile disks.

Path of Exile test: 1m31.59s

Noteworthy options:
Allow the creation and use of templates, which are image of RAMDisks that don't save changes made to them.
Can format to another file system, images will preserve the change.

*Bond Disc*
Memory allocation: Driver Locked

640MB (FAT)


Shutdown/Boot times:
No RAMDisk loaded:
N/A (the RAMDisk is loaded on boot, this setting cannot be configured)
640MB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2735ms--19239ms--47s
640MB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 28085ms--39793ms--91s
640MB RAMDisk (mirroring/parity off):
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 16740ms--30251ms--70s

Load/Unload times:
640MB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: instant--instant
640MB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 22.77s--26.41s
640MB RAMDisk image load/unload time (mirroring/parity off): 11.97s--14.14s
Images are 3 times the size of the content in the RAMDisk they are associated to (to provide data mirroring and parity)
Empty images take as long to load as volatile disks.
When no changes are made to an image, unload times are the same as volatile disks.

Path of Exile test: N/A

Noteworthy options:
Highly specialized software, offer many encryption and archival options.
Cannot format to another file system.

*Buffalo Ramdisk*
Memory allocation: Unknown. RAMDisk memory is not even visible to windows

4GB (FAT32)

30GB (FAT32)


Shutdown/Boot times (I was able to set up symbolic links so that the backup would be on my 2TB 7200RPM drive. The Problem is that Buffalo RAMDisk seems to operate at the same level as a bootkit (it loads itself before windows) and fails to read the symbolic links, so only the shutdown values will be correct. To get an approximation of loading time add the Shutdown time to the Boot time)
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2879ms--18711ms--47s
4GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2776ms--19911ms--46s
4GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 31543ms--20126ms--76s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2792ms--23212ms--49s
30GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 200475ms--23615ms--273s

Load/Unload times
N/A (The RAMDisk can only be loaded/unloaded by rebooting)
Images are always the size of the RAMDisk they are associated to.
Empty images take as long to load as full ones.
When no changes are made to an image, unload times are the same as volatile disks.

Path of Exile test: N/A (needs NTFS since 1 file is over 4GB)

Noteworthy options:
Splits image in 512MB files
Cannot change backup location (defaults to C: drive)
Cannot format to another file system.

*Dataram RAMDisk*
Memory allocation: Driver Locked

4GB (FAT32)

4GB (NTFS)


Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3238ms--18338ms--46s
4GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2963ms--18446--47s
4GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 5290ms-21548ms--95s (see note)

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 0.81s-1.21s
4GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 28.48s-44.87s (see note)
Images are always the size of the RAMDisk they are associated to.
Empty images take as long to load as full ones.
When no changes are made to an image, unload times are the same as when the whole disk has been written to.

Path of Exile test: N/A

Noteworthy options:
Announces that the data has been successfully written to disk when it only has been dumped to memory (a power failure before Windows has finished writing the data would result in corrupt data and the time Windows give for Shutdown is misleading since even if everything has been unloaded and it's ready to shut down it still has to finish writing the backup to disk.). For my test I stopped the timer when disk I/O stopped.

*Gilisoft RAMDisk*
Memory allocation: Driver Locked

4GB (FAT32)

30GB (FAT32)

NTFS results were slightly slower but still very similar.

Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2571ms--19792ms--46s
4GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2852ms--18368ms--45s
4GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 24338ms--24119ms--70s (see notes)
30GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2626ms--18896ms--47s
30GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 182772ms--25108ms--238s(see notes)

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 0.95s--1.98s
4GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 24.72s--30.37s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 14.93s--2.19s
30GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 3m00.17s--3m10.91s(see notes)
Images are always the size of the RAMDisk they are associated to.
Empty images take as long to load as full ones.
When no changes are made to an image, unload times are the same as volatile disks.

Path of Exile test: 1m26.82s

Noteworthy options:
Splits image in 2GB files, any change require a full rewrite of the entire image.
Non-volatile disks are not available directly after boot. You have to wait for the full image to be loaded in memory.
I had to create the image files manually to create an image of the 30GB RAMDisk. Otherwise I Would either get a "Device is busy" or "Writing image remarks error", even when Gilisoft RAMDisk was the only program open.
Creating a RAMDisk, then removing it, then creating another one can lead to a situation where it will take over 5 minutes to create the new RAMDisk. I recommend you reboot before you want to create a new RAMDisk (make sure automount is off).

*Gizmo Drive*
Memory allocation: Paged Pool (allocated only when needed)

4GB (NTFS)


Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3176ms--19791ms--46s

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 1.54s--2.09s

Path of Exile test: N/A

Noteworthy options:
Can't format to FAT32

*ImDisk*
Memory allocation: Process Private (allocated only when needed)

4GB (FAT32)

30GB (FAT32)

NTFS results were slightly slower but still very similar.

Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3229ms--18546ms--46s

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 3.46s--0.96s
4GB RAMDisk image load/save time: 25.36s--44.57s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 11.36s--0.96s
30GB RAMDisk image load/save time: 2m45.09--2m57.52
Images are always the size of the RAMDisk they are associated to.
Empty images take as long to load as full ones.
When no changes are made to an image, save times are the same as when the whole disk has been written to.

Path of Exile test: 1m23.34s

Noteworthy options:
Announces that the data has been successfully written to disk when it only has been dumped to memory (a power failure before windows has finished writing the data would result in corrupt data). For my test I stopped the timer when disk I/O stopped.

*Passmark OSFMount*
Memory allocation: Process Private (allocated only when needed)

4GB (FAT32)

30GB (FAT32)

NTFS results were slightly slower but still very similar.

Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3030ms--19816ms--46s

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 2.41s--0.84s
4GB RAMDisk image load/save time: Was unable to save an image
30GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 9.96s--0.84s
30GB RAMDisk image load/save time: Was unable to save an image

Path of Exile test: 1m22.22s

Noteworthy options:

*Primo Ramdisk Ultimate*
Memory allocation: Driver Locked

SCSI
30GB (FAT32)

30GB (NTFS)

Direct-IO
30GB (FAT32)

30GB (NTFS)

4GB results are very similar

Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2913ms--18377ms--46s
4GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2942ms--19926ms--47s
4GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 49153ms--46425ms--120s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3014ms--19325ms--46s
30GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 252441ms--182378ms--459s

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 1.44s (4.68s for Direct-IO)--0.94s
4GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 25.64s--1m36.88s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 2.21s (5.69s for Direct-IO)--0.88s
30GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 2m47.44s--4m48.51s
Images are always the size of the RAMDisk they are associated to (on default settings)
Empty images take as long to load as full ones (on default settings)
When no changes are made to an image, unload times are the same as volatile disks.

Path of Exile test: 1m20.72s

Noteworthy options:
Only writes the changes made to an image.
Has a lot of options like delayed load, load only mode, unified invisible memory management, dynamic memory management and more that I haven't had time to look into.

*RamPhantomEX*
Memory allocation: Driver Locked

256MB (NTFS)


Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2725ms--18785ms--45s
256MB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2927ms--20030ms--46s
256MB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: paid version only

Load/Unload times
256MB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: instant--instant
256MB RAMDisk image load/unload time: paid version only

Path of Exile test: N/A

Noteworthy options:

*SoftPerfect RAM Disk*
Memory allocation: Driver Locked

4GB (FAT32)

4GB (NTFS)

30GB (FAT32)

30GB (NTFS)


Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3192ms--18275ms--46s
4GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3150ms--19164ms--46s
4GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 25063ms--41423ms--91s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2780ms--21836ms--48s
30GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 169179ms--185568ms--379s

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 3.94s--0.74
4GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 25.33s--27.56s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 6.66s--0.86s
30GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 2m50.85s--3m02.03s
Images are always the size of the RAMDisk they are associated to.
Empty images take as long to load as full ones.
When no changes are made to an image, save times are the same as when the whole disk has been written to.

Path of Exile test: 1m20.60s

Noteworthy options:
No manual image save option

*StarWind RAM Disk*
Memory allocation: Driver Locked

4GB (FAT32)

30GB (FAT32)

NTFS results were slightly slower but still very similar.

Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3135ms--18848ms--45s
4GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3049ms--18639ms--45s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3063ms--21631ms--47s

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 2.65s--0.96s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 15.80s--1.00s

Path of Exile test: 1m21.16s

Noteworthy options:
Formats to different file systems don't persist on reboot.
Disk are not available directly after boot.

*SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus*
Memory allocation: Driver Locked

30GB (FAT32)

30GB (NTFS)

4GB results are very similar

Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2633ms--18253ms--45s
4GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2797ms--18810ms--45s
4GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 4564ms--22242ms--79s (see notes)
30GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3171ms--19302ms--46s
30GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 144572ms--32941ms--212s (see notes)

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 3.34s--1.96s
4GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 26.37--35.98s (see notes)
30GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 4.09s--2.73s
30GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 2m48.72--2m59.79s (see notes)
Images are the size of the content in the RAMDisk they are associated to.
Empty images take as long to load as newly created ones.
When no changes are made to an image, save times are the same as when the whole disk has been written to.

Path of Exile test: 1m21.26s

Noteworthy options:
Loaded images are available as soon as the RAMDisk is created and before all the content is in memory. For my test I stopped the timer when disk I/O stopped.
Announces that the data has been successfully written to disk when it only has been dumped to memory (a power failure before Windows has finished writing the data would result in corrupt data and the time Windows give for Shutdown is misleading since even if everything has been unloaded and it's ready to shut down it still has to finish writing the backup to disk.). For my test I stopped the timer when disk I/O stopped.

*VSuite Ramdisk Server*
Memory allocation: Driver Locked

Direct-IO
30GB (FAT32)

30GB (NTFS)

4GB results were very similar
SCSI results were slightly slower

Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2814ms--19107ms--46s
4GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2732ms--21586ms--48s
4GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 27369ms--42153ms--94s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3091ms--150794ms--178s
30GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 190556ms--315573ms--532s

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 3.32s--0.85s (6.48s--1.94s for Direct-IO)
4GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 26.74s--22.43s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 2m10.39s--1.01s
30GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: 5m05.79s--2m44.84s
Images are always the size of the RAMDisk they are associated to (on default settings)
Empty images take as long to load as full ones (on default settings)
When no changes are made to an image, unload times are the same as volatile disks.

Path of Exile test: 1m21.20s

Noteworthy options:
Quick Save mode, Quick Load move, Smart Mirror (only saves changes made to an image) and more that I haven't had time to look into.

*WinRamTech (QSoft)*
Memory allocation: Nonpaged Pool

30GB (FAT32)

30GB (NTFS)

4GB results were very similar

Shutdown/Boot times
No RAMDisk loaded:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3071ms--18240ms--45s
4GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 2975ms--23097ms--50s
4GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 26930ms--47210ms--99s
30GB Volatile RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 3281ms--22736ms--50s
30GB RAMDisk:
Shutdown/Boot/Reboot: 169279ms--208289ms--410s

Load/Unload times
4GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 3.55s--0.95s (see notes)
4GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: N/A (see notes)
30GB Volatile RAMDisk creation/unload time: 3.79s--1.70s(see notes)
30GB RAMDisk image load/unload time: N/A (see notes)
Images are always the size of the RAMDisk they are associated to.
Empty images take as long to load as full ones.
When no changes are made to an image, unload times are the same as volatile disks.

Path of Exile test: 1m19.27s

Noteworthy options:
Only writes the changes made to an image.
Takes a long time to create the first image.
The only way to start/stop the RAMDisk is enable/disable it in Windows device manager.
Due to difficulties in managing multiple images, the results were not included


----------



## Brokenstorm

*Summary and conclusion*

Let's me start by saying that there s no perfect RAMDisks. Each has its strengths and flaws and whether those are relevant to you is highly dependent on how you decide to make use of the RAMDisk.
That being said, I'll try to objectively list the pros and cons of each software.

*ArchiCrypt Ramdisk*
Pros:
-Paid version offers encryption

Cons:
-Only available in German
-Slowest RAMDisk tested
-Slow response time
-IO/s don't scale with high queue depth
-Runs as a service (Save on shutdown might be interrupted by WaitToKillServiceTimeout)

*Bond Disc*
Pros:
-Free
-Excellent performance
-Has a lot of archival and encryption options
-Only writes the changes made to an image

Cons:
-Maximum size of 640MB
-Can only use a FAT filesystem
-Image Load/Save is relatively slow
-Unintuitive interface
-Development has stopped

*Buffalo Ramdisk*
Pros:
-Free

Cons:
-2nd slowest RAMDisk tested
-Can only use a FAT32 filesystem
-Require reboot to change RAMDisk size
-Hides the memory it uses from the OS
-IO/s don't scale with queue depth
-Can't change the backup location

*Dataram RAMDisk*
Pros:
-Good performance

Cons:
-Rewrites the whole image, even when no changes have been made
-Setting changes only apply after the RAMDisk has been unmounted

*Gilisoft RAMDisk*
Pros:
-Excellent performance

Cons:
-Extremely slow response time on random read/write
-IO/s don't scale with queue depth
-Can have problems creating very large image files
-I had problems creating a RAMDisk after removing one

*Gizmo Drive*
Pros:
-Free
-Good performance

Cons:
-No backup options
-Maximum size of 4GB
-Can only use a NTFS filesystem

*ImDisk*
Pros:
-Free
-Open source
-Good performance

Cons:
-Only manual backups

*Passmark OSFMount*
Pros:
-Free
-Good performance

Cons:
-Only manual backups

*Primo Ramdisk Ultimate*
Pros:
-Excellent performance
-Offers both SCSI and Direct-IO
-Only writes the changes made to an image
-Offers the most options of all the programs tested

Cons:
-Initial image takes a long time to create

*RamPhantomEX*
Pros:
-Good performance

Cons:
-Only available in Japanese

*SoftPerfect RAM Disk*
Pros:
-Free
-Excellent performance

Cons:
-Performance decreases on large RAMDisks
-IO/s don't scale with high queue depth
-Rewrites the whole image, even when no changes have been made

*StarWind RAM Disk*
Pros:
-Free
-Good performance

Cons:
-No backup options

*SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus*
Pros:
-Excellent performance

Cons:
-Rewrites the whole image, even when no changes have been made

*VSuite Ramdisk Server*
Pros:
-Excellent performance
-Good set of features

Cons:
-Slow creation speed for large RAMDisks
-Primo RAMDisk can do everything it does better and is cheaper

*WinRamTech (QSoft)*
Pros:
-Best performance of all the RAMDisk tested
-Only writes the changes made to an image

Cons:
-Initial image takes a long time to create
-Extremely difficult to manage more than 1 image, especially if they are of different sizes

*Other considerations*

*FAT32 vs NTFS*
FAT32
Pros:
-Faster
Cons:
-4GB maximum file size

NTFS
Pros:
-No file size limit
Cons:
-Doesn't scale well with high queue depth

*SCSI vs Direct-IO*
SCSI
Pros:
-Recognized by Windows Disk Management and almost all disk management utilities
-Can be used as a RAW drive by a Virtual Machine
Cons:
-Slower than Direct-IO

Direct-IO
Pros:
-Better performance than a SCSI disk (especially on accessing small files)
Cons:
-Treated as a logical disk (not visible to some disk management utilities)

*Cluster size*
Cluster size may have an impact on performance.
Cluster size smaller than 4k will hurt performance (since DRAM has a 4k cluster size)
Cluster size bigger than 4k may increase performance but will also increase wasted space

*Bottlenecks*
*CPU:* In most cases memory bandwidth will be limited by the speed of the CPU. There is no easy way to tell how much bandwidth the processor can handle, the only way to know for sure is to test it with a benchmark. That is because even with identical clocks this value will vary based on the processor architecture and memory controller, but as a general rule of thumb higher frequency result in more memory bandwidth.

*RAM:* Unlike with CPUs, it's very easy to determine the maximum memory bandwidth of DDR2/3. Simply multiply the memory frequency by 8 (since DDR2/3 transfers data on a 64bits wide bus) to get the peak transfer rate in MB/s. For single threaded application this will be your peak bandwidth. To determine the peak bandwidth for multi-threaded application you need to multiply the peak transfer rate by the number of memory channels your CPU supports (either 2, 3 or 4).

Now compare that value with the one you got for your CPU. If they are very close then your memory is likely limiting your memory bandwidth, otherwise your CPU is the bottleneck. This is useful information to have when trying to determine which product to buy to optimize your memory bandwidth. It can also help to get a better understanding of why Anvil's, ATTO and CrystalDiskMark report different results in certain cases.

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark use a single thread to determine a drive performance. So for example, with 1600MHz DDR3 those tool will never report speeds higher than 12.5GB/s for a RAMDisk. On the other hand, Anvil's use 4 thread for tests with a queue depth of 4 and 16 for those with a queue depth of 16 and therefore could report higher speed in those tests.


----------



## Tjj226 Angel

Very interesting


----------



## Brokenstorm

Here are the benchmarks that I was able to find that can detect Direct-IO disks.
All the test were done with WinRamTech 20GB NTFS RAMDisk with the rig in my sig but at stock (2.67GHz)

Anvil's Storage Utilities

Version: 1.0.51 RC6
Source: http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?273661-Anvil-s-Storage-Utilities
Notes: Needs at least 1GB free to run

ATTO

Version: 2.47
Source: http://www.attotech.com/products/product.php?sku=Disk_Benchmark
Notes: Results over 4GB/s loops back, but still seem in line with other tools

CrystalDiskMark

Version: 3.0.2f
Source: http://crystalmark.info/software/index-e.html
Notes:

FDBench


Version: 1.02
Source: http://www.hdbench.net/ja/fdbench/
Notes: GUI can only display 6 digits (up to 1GB/s), but can copy the raw results

IOMeter

Version: 1.1.0
Source: http://www.iometer.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/iometer/
Notes: Still learning how to use it

PCMark 7

Version: 1.4
Source: http://www.futuremark.com/benchmarks/pcmark7
Notes:

I'll wait for some feedback before starting to test all the others RAMDisks.
In the meantime I'm interested in testing the effect of different file systems, RAM timings, RAM speed, hyperthreading off.
Maybe I'll try those same thing with Win8 to see if it makes any difference.


----------



## Sean Webster

Sweet thread, I'll add it to the essentials when it is complete.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Sean Webster*
> 
> Sweet thread, I'll add it to the essentials when it is complete.


Thanks

Here are some test I will do to help me get a greater understanding of what affects RAMDisks performance.

Test 1: Remove the second set of memory modules
Predicted effet: None

Test 2: Increase memory timings to an unrealistic 20-20-20-2T
Predicted effect: Increased latency, same performance

Test 3: Only use 1x8GB 10-10-10
Predicted effect: Obviously this will decrease memory bandwidth, but since all RAMDisks seem to be single threaded it might not impact performance

Test 4: Switch out 3x8GB 10-10-10 for 3x2GB 7-7-7
Predicted effect: Decreased latency, same performance

Test 5: Increase RAM frequency
Predicted effect: Minimal performance difference
Note: From previous testing I found out that CPU speed was the primary bottleneck so I don't expect increasing the memory frequency will do much.

Test 6: Decrease RAM frequency to 800MHz
Predicted effect: Possibly move the bottleneck from the CPU to the memory. If CPU is still the bottleneck, results should remain similar
Note: I know CPU speed will bottleneck a RAMDisk speed, but I want to test if memory frequency can as well. So for this test I overclock my CPU in small increments until I either get to 4GHz or reach a memory bottleneck. If I don't reach a bottleneck I might try with 1x8GB.

Test 7: Disable Hypertreading (Back to original memory configuration)
Predicted effect: None

Test 8: Use different file systems (FAT/FAT32/NTFS/exFAT/UDF)
Predicted effect: Minimal performance difference

Test 9: Enable NTFS compression and/or indexing
Predicted effect: Minimal performance difference

Test 10: Use diffent operating system( XP, Vista, 7, 8)
Predicted effect: 7 and 8 should be similar. I expect XP to have the worst performance with vista somewhere in between.
Note: I'll probably do this in a VM


----------



## Brokenstorm

I'll only include the results from Anvil, ATTO and CrystalDisk from now on since I think they are the most representative. FDBench hasn't been updated in over 5 years, IOMeter seems like a dead project and PCMark 7 takes forever to run. I'll still mention the other if they had interesting results.
I also reduced the size of the RAMDisk to 4.125GB so that it would be the same for all the tests.

Test 1: Results are nearly identical.


Test 2: The maximum my BIOS would accept was 11-10-10-31-2N, so I went with that.
Latency went up but results stayed very similar.


Test 3: There was slightly more variations in those results, but they were still very much in line with the previous ones if only slightly slower.
Even in these less than ideal conditions memory doesn't appear to be the bottleneck. Testing with SiSoft Sandra, I still had 10GB/s of memory bandwidth. So it seems unlikely that memory bandwidth will ever but an issue.


Test 4: Latency went down ever so slightly but results stayed the same across the board.


Test 5: Well that didn't go has expected. I wasn't able to overclock my RAM, one of the stick kept dropping out. I might try again later with another set but for now I'll have to try to extrapolate the result of the next test to try to get an idea of the effect of higher memory frequency.

If anyone with 2400MHz+ memory would be willing to run this test I would be grateful.

Test 6: Memory was set at 5-5-5-18 @ 800MHz.
Performance went down across the board by around 5% but without the results from higher clocked memory it's hard to draw any conclusion from those results.


Since my 920 has a locked multiplier I wasn't able to overclock my CPU without also overclocking my RAM. As a result I was not able to test for a memory bottleneck.
But given the extreme effort one would have to make to cripple his machine in order to reach a memory bottleneck, I think it's safe to say that nobody needs to worry about it.

Test 7: Other than the CPU utilization predictably rising to 25%, results were nearly identical. Only FDBench gave me unexpected result with 20% faster copy. Hard to tell if this is due to a flaw in the program or something else.


Test 8: For this test I only ran Anvil, ATTO and CrystalDisk as the other either take too long to run or don't give any additional information.
NTFS seems to be slower than both FAT32 and exFAT when the queue depth gets above 4. Other than that the result where similar.

NTFS:


FAT32:


exFAT:


Test 9: This RAMDisk doesn't like NTFS compression at all. In both Anvil and ATTO reads were slashed in half and writes went down by an order of magnitude. Even with compressible data the result were still pretty bad. Only Crystal disk gave me results similar to the previous ones.


Test 10: I didn't have time to do tests with different OS, so instead I did some with my CPU at 3.8GHz.


So now that we can prove that processor speed is the main factor that determines a RAMDisk performance, I think I'm ready to start testing each program.
I'll probably have my CPU a 3.6GHz for these so that the differences in performance (if any) are more noticeable.

I still have the determine what settings I should use (RAMDisk size, file system, etc) for the tests to be fair.
So if you have any ideas about that or if you want me to test other things such as the boot speed when loading an image let me know.


----------



## Brokenstorm

I thought a little about how I'm going to test the RAMDisks and so far I've made certain decisions.

-I will only do test with FAT32 or NTFS (unless only FAT is possible in that case i'll use that) and I'll run Anvil, ATTO and crystaldisk on each.
-I'll do 2 sets of test. The first one will be with a disk size of 4GB (or whatever the max size is if lower). The second one will be a disk large enough to load a game (likely 20 to 30GB, let me know if you have any preference)(NTFS will be the default file system for this test with FAT32 as a backup)
-On the larger disk I'll probably try to test how fast game loads are. I'm not sure which games would be best suited for that, so if you have any idea let me know.
-I'll do boot speed test for those that allow to load an image at boot
-For those that allow more than 1 SCSI drive, I might try to raid them (performance decrease is likely)
-For those with backups I might try to hard format to another file system to see how it handles that

I'm open to suggestions, so if you have any test you would like me to run let me know.

I'll need to reinstall win7 before I start these test since my barebone install lacks many of the tools I'll need. I expect to start testing next week so that should give people some time to share their thoughts and give feedback.


----------



## quipers

Can't wait to see the results.


----------



## Redwoodz

AMD Ramdisk? It's free up to 6GB.

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


----------



## Just a nickname

dude... i hope you love ram.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Redwoodz*
> 
> AMD Ramdisk? It's free up to 6GB.
> 
> http://www.radeonmemory.com/software_downloads.php


It's a rebrand of Dataram RAMDisk.

But thanks I'll add a note to it.


----------



## Redwoodz

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> It's a rebrand of Dataram RAMDisk.
> 
> But thanks I'll add a note to it.


Thanks,good to know!


----------



## Brokenstorm

Ok, I came up with my first gaming test.

It consist of loading path of exile then use every waypoint of act 1 and 2. The timer stops when I load the last zone.
On a 7200RPM drive I get 2min50s
On a RAMDrive I get 1min20sec

I was going to load up D3 for the first time in over 6 months for this test but it turned out they were having a 6 HOURS maintenance. I mean wow, MMO don't even maintenance that long.


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Ok, I came up with my first gaming test.
> 
> It consist of loading path of exile then use every waypoint of act 1 and 2. The timer stops when I load the last zone.
> On a 7200RPM drive I get 2min50s
> On a RAMDrive I get 1min20sec


How long was it from cold boot to completing the test in each case?

Obviously running from a RAMDrive is going to have a huge performance boost, but if it takes an extra hour to set up & copy the files across to it after each boot it's not going to be popular. But if the softwares can cope with loading into RAM in the background so the difference in startup time is minimal for an eventual increase in speed that would be worth knowing about.

Basically - usability of each software is more of a concern than any raw speed differences (especially because I suspect any speed differences between the different ramdisks you will see will be irrelevant in real-world usage)


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *the_beast*
> 
> How long was it from cold boot to completing the test in each case?


I don't actually use the backup function right now because the RAMDisk I use makes it difficult to manage multiple images at the same time. But I'll absolutely include that in my tests.

What I do is install the games to the RAMDisk and then copy the folder to a 2TB backup drive. POE is about 5.5GB and it takes 30 second to copy from a 7200RPM drive.


----------



## Brokenstorm

I'm looking into the way each RAMDisks locks the memory it needs, pretty interesting stuff. So far there seems to be 3 different ways they can do it.

I'm curious to see if there will be any correlation between their performance and the way they handle memory.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Getting ready to start testing
Here are the default results

Run 1
Reboot: 49s
Shutdown: 2848ms
Boot: 19643ms
PoE: 2m48.24

Run 2
Reboot: 45s
Shutdown: 2697ms
Boot: 18656ms
PoE: 2m38.69


----------



## Brokenstorm

Man, nothing but problems with the first 4 RAMDisks.








I just hope the rest don't give me as much of a headache.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Well, I learned something today.
Out of memory + no pagefile = hard crash


----------



## Sean Webster

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Well, I learned something today.
> Out of memory + no pagefile = hard crash


yup lol


----------



## the_beast

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Well, I learned something today.
> Out of memory + no pagefile = hard crash


and this is why I don't understand why anyone would ever turn off the PF - there are no downsides to leaving it enabled, but you can see issues if you turn it off (but I don't really want to get into that debate again and derail this thread!)


----------



## Brokenstorm

I'm finally done with the performance tests.
I guess all that's left to do is write a summary with the pros an cons of each software.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Damn, I keep thinking of new things to test.
Like for the programs that just dump their content to memory on the RAMDisk save, they probably wouldn't if Write-caching was disabled on the backup drive.
I'm also curious if different cluster size would make any difference in performance.


----------



## Brokenstorm

I've finally completed all the testing








Sorry for getting a little sidetracked.


----------



## Sean Webster

Great job!

Which one is your favorite? At the moment I like SoftPerfect RAMDIsk.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Yes SoftPerfect RAMDIsk is by far the best free RAMDisk and it's very easy to use.

I'm using WinRamTech (which technically can also be free, although it does expire every 4 months) so I can use exFAT and get similar performance to FAT32 without the file size limit.

But's that's only because I don't use the backup feature. If I did I would either go with SoftPerfect or pay for Primo RAMDisk.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Seems like Dataram RAMDisk just had a pretty major update, I might have to give it another look.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Pretty good performance improvement for Dataram.

4.0.5.RC0

4.1.0.RC25


They've also reduced image load/save time by almost 50%, bringing them more in line with other RAMDisks.
But they still save the whole image on driver unload when no changes have been made to the image and still claim that they do not..

All in all a good update, I've moved to the good performance group.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Does anyone have access to ASUS ROG Ramdisk?
I'm curious as to it's performance.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Just found this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2XpXzTAq1c#t=26m50s

Seems like it will be included with their Haswell ROG motherboards.
From the crystaldisk results they get it seems like it's based on ImDisk and also has Save on Shutdown, Load on Boot and Synchronous Backup.


----------



## Catalin

Hello All!

Thank you Brokenstorm for this COMPLETE testing of ramdisk software!!!

I have read all, and in conclusion if i did understand all right, the best options to choose from, is either from Primo Ramdisk Ultimate or WinRamTech (QSoft) so the the question is wich one from these two will be better for my configuration? I have Corsair DDR3 8GB 1333MHz, KIT 2x4GB, 9-9-9-24, XMS3 radiator, dual channel, I want to allocate 4gb for the RamDisk, with an i7 2600 3,4-3.8 and corsair forcegt 90gb ssd.

Also wich one of this two, and if none of these two, from the other ones tested will work good also on Mac OS? i run win and mac,


----------



## Brokenstorm

I would be hesitant to recommend WinRamTech to anyone (especially if it's their first time playing around with RAMDisks) as it is one of the least user friendly program on the list.

If you just want to try if a RAMDisk can be useful for you I would recommend SoftPerfect RAM Disk.
If you find that it is and are comfortable with playing around a little then try Primo or WinRamTech.

As far as I know none of these programs will work on a mac, but you can use the terminal to create one. Can't tell you more than that as I don't own a mac.
Link


----------



## Catalin

Thx for you answer!


----------



## Catalin

Hello,

I made a Top for me so I can see clear wich one is exactly the best according to the results in the benchmarks, so I though I should share this with you guys, because you also worked a lot. Selected only CrystalDiskMark results in top for 4GB, because i have 8GB and i can use only 4GB for RamDisk and this was relevant to me, where 4GB not available, was used 30GB results, where no NTFS results because similar was used the FAT32 results.

*Top for Ramdisks:* Because of the page setup here, I can`t paste it here and to view right so see attached:

Ramdisks Top.txt 6k .txt file


If somebody can paste here and view right be my guest









We can make also the best one by *Ratio*`s top, with *Seq/512/4/4Q=???* or split *Seq/512=???* and *4/4Q=???* if we need more accurate results :d but for me was enough this top to see clear all i wanted for my choice.

*Now i want to understand clear, what`s the speed that counts the most at RamDisk, the 4 or 4Q of the Writes right or also the Reads? or the total overall of 4/4Q R/W, or all?*


----------



## levontraut

nice write up dude

i always wanted to do soemthing liek this and give it a try but was never sure how to and wat app to use... now with your testing i can look into it.

cheers


----------



## Catalin

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *levontraut*
> 
> nice write up dude
> 
> i always wanted to do soemthing liek this and give it a try but was never sure how to and wat app to use... now with your testing i can look into it.
> 
> cheers


Thx! I use no app, but it can be done more easy with grids/rullers or Excel for sure, I did it just with notepad, took me a lot of time and attention









Maybe someone who knows edting html can paste it here, and maybe someone else can make the ratios also







there will be the true right answer, I`ve done the second hardest part, the hardest the OP did and I thank him!


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Catalin*
> 
> Maybe someone who knows edting html can paste it here, and maybe someone else can make the ratios also
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> there will be the true right answer, I`ve done the second hardest part, the hardest the OP did and I thank him!


Here are all the results
Link

If I have time I'll try to make the chart


----------



## Catalin

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Here are all the results
> Link
> 
> If I have time I'll try to make the chart


Id wanted to do something like this, but not with scores, I wanted with ratio`s variants like I wrotted up in bold, but didn't have time for this, attached is a pdf top from an .edu, I think there is only the commercial nonfree soft:

Ramdisk Benchmarks.pdf 2138k .pdf file


----------



## Brokenstorm

FAT32

SeqR





SeqW





512R





512W
1.SoftPerfect75011.SoftPerfect92791.SoftPerfect77351.SoftPerfect93282.Primo61422.WinRamTech82292.WinRamTech61592.WinRamTech80583.Bond Disc61283.Primo80823.Primo60723.Primo78344.WinRamTech59854.Bond Disc80314.Bond Disc59834.Bond Disc78215.Gilisoft58185.ImDisk78735.ImDisk56695.ImDisk75866.SuperSpeed57356.Passmark78686.Passmark56526.Passmark75457.StarWind56717.Dataram78347.Dataram56257.Dataram74828.VSuite56688.VSuite78098.VSuite55688.VSuite74429.Dataram56479.SuperSpeed77389.SuperSpeed55569.SuperSpeed742010.Passmark562810.StarWind764410.StarWind555310.StarWind741711.ImDisk561311.Gilisoft747211.Gilisoft554011.Gilisoft737312.Buffalo301312.Buffalo336712.Buffalo302612.Buffalo337113.ArchiCrypt933.513.ArchiCrypt132313.ArchiCrypt929.913.ArchiCrypt154814.Gizmo Drive-14.Gizmo Drive-14.Gizmo Drive-14.Gizmo Drive-15.PhantomEX-15.PhantomEX-15.PhantomEX-15.PhantomEX-





NTFS

SeqR





SeqW





512R





512W
1.SoftPerfect74151.SoftPerfect87491.SoftPerfect76501.SoftPerfect91882.WinRamTech62122.WinRamTech79412.WinRamTech61312.WinRamTech80303.Gilisoft59663.Gilisoft78723.Gilisoft60493.Gilisoft80244.SuperSpeed57534.SuperSpeed78664.SuperSpeed59134.SuperSpeed78085.Primo57065.Primo78215.Primo58175.Primo77986.ImDisk56746.ImDisk77896.ImDisk57876.ImDisk75647.VSuite55707.VSuite77897.VSuite55447.VSuite75338.Passmark55688.Passmark75808.Passmark55368.Passmark75049.Gizmo Drive55019.Gizmo Drive75259.Gizmo Drive55099.Gizmo Drive746410.PhantomEX547210.PhantomEX738010.PhantomEX544610.PhantomEX717711.StarWind543311.StarWind733211.StarWind541311.StarWind715412.Dataram540412.Dataram727112.Dataram521712.Dataram686213.ArchiCrypt823.813.ArchiCrypt110613.ArchiCrypt82013.ArchiCrypt122414.Bond Disc-14.Bond Disc-14.Bond Disc-14.Bond Disc-15.Buffalo-15.Buffalo-15.Buffalo-15.Buffalo-





FAT32

4R





4W





4QR





4QW
1.ImDisk19021.ImDisk15101.ImDisk17691.ImDisk16142.Passmark18992.Passmark14782.Passmark17452.Passmark15953.Primo18723.Primo14763.Primo17293.Primo15494.Gilisoft17554.Gilisoft14554.Gilisoft17054.Gilisoft13985.SoftPerfect17395.SoftPerfect14375.SoftPerfect16785.SoftPerfect13896.Bond Disc16516.Bond Disc13916.Bond Disc16036.Bond Disc13567.WinRamTech12977.WinRamTech11077.WinRamTech15587.WinRamTech13548.VSuite11118.VSuite923.28.VSuite15508.VSuite13469.SuperSpeed958.99.SuperSpeed801.89.SuperSpeed11359.SuperSpeed101710.StarWind787.610.StarWind80110.StarWind104910.StarWind909.611.Dataram76911.Dataram777.911.Dataram858.611.Dataram749.912.ArchiCrypt291.412.ArchiCrypt287.412.ArchiCrypt412.412.ArchiCrypt394.313.Buffalo17113.Buffalo15913.Buffalo162.513.Buffalo158.214.Gizmo Drive-14.Gizmo Drive-14.Gizmo Drive-14.Gizmo Drive-15.PhantomEX-15.PhantomEX-15.PhantomEX-15.PhantomEX-





NTFS

4R





4W





4QR





4QW
1.ImDisk18041.ImDisk13421.ImDisk17181.ImDisk13312.Primo17262.Primo13152.Primo16422.Primo13153.Gizmo Drive16993.Gizmo Drive12703.Gizmo Drive16133.Gizmo Drive13134.Passmark15704.Passmark12704.Passmark16064.Passmark12915.WinRamTech15345.WinRamTech12265.WinRamTech16025.WinRamTech12856.SoftPerfect14756.SoftPerfect10966.SoftPerfect15816.SoftPerfect12657.Gilisoft12227.Gilisoft943.27.Gilisoft15557.Gilisoft12198.VSuite11998.VSuite9068.VSuite14648.VSuite11989.PhantomEX774.29.PhantomEX747.99.PhantomEX13209.PhantomEX101810.SuperSpeed768.310.SuperSpeed689.410.SuperSpeed107710.SuperSpeed885.711.StarWind753.611.StarWind658.311.StarWind107211.StarWind867.112.Dataram730.712.Dataram635.912.Dataram683.612.Dataram603.913.ArchiCrypt316.713.ArchiCrypt309.313.ArchiCrypt413.113.ArchiCrypt39814.Bond Disc-14.Bond Disc-14.Bond Disc-14.Bond Disc-15.Buffalo-15.Buffalo-15.Buffalo-15.Buffalo-

And here are some graphs


----------



## Catalin

Hello,

At Softperfect either 3.3.3 or beta 3.4 I cant check the Save contents to associated image every. min, I made a ramdisk, and also an image, when creating ramdisk I cant check, than I make image and mount, I go proprieties again and advance to check save, it doesn't become available to check, what do I miss here?


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Catalin*
> 
> Hello,
> 
> At Softperfect either 3.3.3 or beta 3.4 I cant check the Save contents to associated image every. min, I made a ramdisk, and also an image, when creating ramdisk I cant check, than I make image and mount, I go proprieties again and advance to check save, it doesn't become available to check, what do I miss here?
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 1.png 41k .png file


If I remember correctly, you have to create an image manually (under the image menu) and then associate it with a ramdisk when you create it.


----------



## Catalin

yes I know this way I did, but no save

my ramdrive is fat32, at raw I cant create folders, at ntfs I can check compression, if i will move programs in ramdisk it is better to have ntfs the ramdisk or it works with fat32 also?


----------



## Brokenstorm

I just reinstalled the program. To be able to check "save every X min" in the advanced menu you have to check "save content to image".
To be able to create folders you have to use a volatile ramdisk (not associated with an image)


----------



## Catalin

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> I just reinstalled the program. To be able to check "save every X min" in the advanced menu you have to check "save content to image".
> To be able to create folders you have to use a volatile ramdisk (not associated with an image)


Well I cant check, I see there the option but is disabled, look my pictures I posted earlier







, what settings did u use? fat or ntfs? comperession? removable? name of ram disk and name of image same?

PS: i just freshed installed windows and i didn't put drivers yet could be this the cause? i don't think is related, should i install rst and try again?


----------



## Brokenstorm

Here is a pic of the setting I created the RAMDisk with


I think you used mount image which does not create a ramdisk, but only create a virtual hard drive of your image.


----------



## Catalin

you first create image than disk ? i first create disk than image


----------



## Brokenstorm

You have to create the image first because you have to link to it when you create the RAMDisk (in the Image File Name field)


----------



## Catalin

Yes, thank you, in this order now it works :d its pretty simple in the rest the program.

I want to understand something tho: my ramdrive is fat32, at raw I cant create folders, at ntfs I can check compression it is recommended?
Also I want to move program or program files or Users folder in ramdisk so it is better to have ntfs the ramdisk or it works with fat32 also? because fat is faster...









LE:
So I tried Softperect very nice and easy, but to simple, and I don't know but the speeds are not so smooth and fast as the benchmark rated, now depends on rigs.

Than I tried WinRamTech, simple at the beginning 1 page







I managed a bit hard to make drive and image tho, has some options u have to document first, not to mention disable/enable reboot etc, ill always choose the Sofperfect instead of Winramtech, even if I loose maybe some minimal speed in 4k R/W

And finally Primo, simple but in the same time with many options despite SoftPerfect, that is the best so far, it has all, speeds the same like others, u can afford to loose again some speeds for the easiness you can use COMPLETE FEATURES OF A RAMDISK! and worth the money to give for it also









*So my choice: Primo!*

Maybe WinramTech is for Experts but disable enable and reboot is a pain in the ass, I need constance at PC not 100120120 reboots, and work with images? forget it!

Softperfect is very simple with few options this is why they made it free also







despite in benchmarks ownz like 3/4 of the speeds, but in my case, I didn't see so much gain like I thought vs the others in speed.


----------



## Brokenstorm

If I had to give my picks it would go like this.
Best Free RAMDisk: SoftPerfect RAM Disk
Best Paid RAMDisk: Primo Ramdisk
Honorable mention: WinRamTech (best for servers and other environments where the RAMDisk is always on and its settings are static)
Honorable mention: SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus (for its ability to wipe a RAMDisk before dismounting it, although a full format would accomplish the same thing)

With SoftPerfect you cannot create folders if you use an image (in that case simply create the folders in the image then save it)
You will not get performance improvements with drive compression, I would leave if turned off to not cause any problems.

As far as SoftPerfect's CrystalDisk results go, I'm not sure there is something wrong with them. That being said, maybe there is a problem there and maybe the fact that performance decreases on larger RAMDisks with SoftPerfect is a symptom of it.
You also have to remember that crystaldisk and ATTO are a single threaded applications, whereas Anvil is multithtreaded. So the 4K and 4K QD32 performance should be the same (with qd32 being a little lower due to the overhead) in single threaded scenarios, while 4K QD32 could end up being higher that sequential performance if you have enough cores to throw at it (but not all RAMDisk scale well with high queue depth, Primo and WinRamTech seem to scale the best).


----------



## Catalin

Hello Borkenstorm!

I need some advice, in Primo:

Physical Memory Settings sections what is does?
Use Ivisible Memory and Quota?
Dynamic Memory Management and Compact mode?

Can you explain each one what it doest exactly?

i have a guess but i want to be sure, im intrested if i dont use all the space in the ram disk the available memory can be used by the Windows.

Thx!


----------



## Brokenstorm

Primo has the best documentation IMO, you should read it, it answers most of your questions.
Link

Physical Memory Settings

Use Invisible Memory: Only for 32bit OS
Dynamic memory management: Only reserves as much memory as is used by the files on the RAMDisk


----------



## Catalin

Yep was usefull, very nice explained







thx!


----------



## fortunesolace

Brokenstorm, how do you monitor the disk I/O, what software?


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *fortunesolace*
> 
> Brokenstorm, how do you monitor the disk I/O, what software?


Depends what you want to do.

If you want a broad look Process Explorer works well.
If you want to know which file are accessed the most so you can move them to a RAMDisk try Process Monitor

To set up Process Monitor follow these instructions


----------



## fortunesolace

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Depends what you want to do.
> 
> If you want a broad look Process Explorer works well.
> If you want to know which file are accessed the most so you can move them to a RAMDisk try Process Monitor
> 
> To set up Process Monitor follow these instructions


I was thinking along the lines of monitoring if the data has been successfully written to disk when it only has been dumped to memory (a power failure before windows has finished writing the data would result in corrupt data). For my test I stopped the timer when disk I/O stopped , like you've written on some of the programs, the Noteworthy Options.

Thank you for answering. +REP


----------



## Brokenstorm

Then Process Explorer should show you want you want.
I'll update later with what a dump to memory vs write to disk looks like (currently have about 2h left on an encode)


----------



## Brokenstorm

This is what you would get if a RAMDisk dumped its data to memory.
Top is memory, bottom is disk


This was on a 4GB drive.
If the program made sure it wrote everything to disk, then the top and bottom graph would be nearly identical.


----------



## Figit090

Holy cow, thanks SO MUCH for this testing!

I'm trying to find a good program for scratchdisks for photoshop and possibly lightroom so they react faster and don't need to use my drives as much. This should help me a lot! I was using a 4gb ramdisk, I think Dataram's option or one of the small freebies you have to pay to enlarge and it worked well but I need to test it more.

Definitely a good option though, I bought 32gb of RAM with the intent of making a ramdisk and need to impliment another good option


----------



## TELVM

Brokenstorm, congratulations and thanks for the smartest and most exhaustive analysis of ramdisk software I've ever seen on the internet





















.










I use Primo in every comp I lay hands on.

BTW I made some tests to check if Dinamic Memory Management has any impact on ramdisk speeds, and didn't find any significative difference (with Crystaldiskmark).


----------



## lowfat

Glad I saw this. I honestly had no idea 80% of these even existed. Primo Ramdisk sounds exactly what I need.


----------



## Brokenstorm

ASUS ROG PCI-E SSD will also be bundled with a RAMDisk utility, not sure which yet.

Source


----------



## tiro_uspsss

this thread delivers







big thanks, rep'd!


----------



## Brokenstorm

I think I have identified another bottleneck beside the CPU.

If I'm correct most (probably all) RAMDisk can be no faster than the peak transfer rate of a single DIMM.
So that would mean the following values are the max each memory frequency is capable of.

1333MHz: 10.417GB/s
1600MHz: 12.5GB/s
1866MHz: 14.583GB/s
2000MHz: 15.625GB/s
2133MHz: 16.667GB/s
2400MHz: 18.75GB/s

I'll try to confirm it when I have time.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Well that was quite easy to test. A single threaded application will never be able to have more than the peak transfer rate of a single DIMM.
Multi-threaded ones though should be able to get as much as the CPU can handle.

Unfortunately my CPU isn't fast enough for memory to become the bottleneck , otherwise I would have liked to test how close each program can get to the theoretical peak memory bandwidth and how they perform when they have to use multiple channels of memory (when under a multi-treaded load)

I have also added a section talking about the different bottleneck a RAMDisk can encounter. For example, the PC ASUS tested their RAMDisk on probably had 1600MHz memory which I why they got around 12GB/s as the top read speed with CrystalDiskMark.
You would think they would know better and use higher frequency memory.









Quote:


> *Bottlenecks*
> *CPU:* In most cases memory bandwidth will be limited by the speed of the CPU. There is no easy way to tell how much bandwidth the processor can handle, the only way to know for sure is to test it with a benchmark. That is because even with identical clocks this value will vary based on the processor architecture and memory controller, but as a general rule of thumb higher frequency result in more memory bandwidth.
> 
> *RAM:* Unlike with CPUs, it's very easy to determine the maximum memory bandwidth of DDR2/3. Simply multiply the memory frequency by 8 (since DDR2/3 transfers data on a 64bits wide bus) to get the peak transfer rate in MB/s. For single threaded application this will be your peak bandwidth. To determine the peak bandwidth for multi-threaded application you need to multiply the peak transfer rate by the number of memory channels your CPU supports (either 2, 3 or 4).
> 
> Now compare that value with the one you got for your CPU. If they are very close then your memory is likely limiting your memory bandwidth, otherwise your CPU is the bottleneck. This is useful information to have when trying to determine which product to buy to optimize your memory bandwidth. It can also help to get a better understanding of why Anvil's, ATTO and CrystalDiskMark report different results in certain cases.
> 
> ATTO and CrystalDiskMark use a single thread to determine a drive performance. So for example, with 1600MHz DDR3 those tool will never report speeds higher than 12.5GB/s for a RAMDisk. On the other hand, Anvil's use 4 thread for tests with a queue depth of 4 and 16 for those with a queue depth of 16 and therefore could report higher speed in those tests.


----------



## Roulette Run

I have read your thread with some interest and I have two primary questions, the first would be to ask; would there be a performance increase running a benchmark program such as 3D Mark 11 from a RAMDisk? The second comes from you most recent post concerning single-thread versus multi-thread applications, does that mean that the AMD processors would make more efficient use of RAMDisk because of their better multi-thread abilities?


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Roulette Run*
> 
> would there be a performance increase running a benchmark program such as 3D Mark 11 from a RAMDisk? The second comes from you most recent post concerning single-thread versus multi-thread applications, does that mean that the AMD processors would make more efficient use of RAMDisk because of their better multi-thread abilities?


That depends how the program runs, if the benchmark loads itself in memory before starting then there shouldn't be any gains, but if it reads heavily from the drive there might be some.

You can run Resource Monitor and under Memory there's an Hard Faults/sec column which will tell you how often the program reads from disk.

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Roulette Run*
> 
> does that mean that the AMD processors would make more efficient use of RAMDisk because of their better multi-thread abilities?


Unlikely, it would require programs to be optimize for it and use more than 1 thread to read data from disk. As far as I know most program do not and I don't see that changing in the near future.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Seems like Raxco (makers of PerfectDisk) are now licensing SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus.
http://www.raxco.com/home/products/ramdisk-plus


----------



## bwana

thank you for an informative post that has tremendous potential in enlightening much of the future complexity of storage management. Already Google , facebook and others have established a file system that spans the internet- creating a vast virtual hard disk. Clearly, caching algorithms play a significant role as speedy local storage has to be invisible to the great and vast internet repository for their web apps. Ram disks and local permanent storage are an interesting model for the problems that are intrinsic to this 'multi-lithic' approach to storage.

As an aside, do you know who AMD licensed their ram disk software from?
http://www.radeonmemory.com/software_updates.php
they post impressive numbers
http://www.radeonmemory.com/software_xtreme.php
(photoshopped?)
Here's the free 4 gb version
http://www.radeonmemory.com/software_downloads.php


----------



## theeohiostate

Brokenstorm i sent you a pm i'm hoping you can answer , and thanks for all the effort for this thread!


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *bwana*
> As an aside, do you know who AMD licensed their ram disk software from?


It's from Dataram RAMDisk. I believe AMD helped them improve their multi-threaded performance because their RAMDisk didn't scale at all before AMD began licensing their software.


----------



## wdgann

Is there any ramdisk that let me use the unused ram because of 23bits xp limit of 4gb ram?

Which free ramdisk is the best choice?


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *wdgann*
> 
> Is there any ramdisk that let me use the unused ram because of 23bits xp limit of 4gb ram?


Both SuperSpeed RamDisk and Primo Ramdisk can. I can't think of any other of the top of my head it's been a while since I used a 32bit OS.
Quote:


> Which free ramdisk is the best choice?


I would recommend SoftPerfect RAM Disk if you never used a RAMDisk before or ImDisk if you want to go open source, both are quite easy to use.


----------



## wdgann

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Both SuperSpeed RamDisk and Primo Ramdisk can. I can't think of any other of the top of my head it's been a while since I used a 32bit OS.
> I would recommend SoftPerfect RAM Disk if you never used a RAMDisk before or ImDisk if you want to go open source, both are quite easy to use.


superspeed is trail instead of free? How does it compare to softperfect?


----------



## theeohiostate

Questions on usage.... I purchased the full version of Raxco Ram Disk and had a few question on setup/usage

1. I have 64GB of DDR3 2400 memory - i run a lot of adobe-3d modeling-video editing software , how large of a Ram Disk should i set up ?

2. I've read its good to put the OS pagefiles/temp files along with your browser cache on the RamDisk (especially since i'm using an ssd for my OS and browsers) , but what about creating a programs files folder on a large enough RamDisk and installing some of my more intense programs on it ? Ofc i would do manual or auto backups of the ramdisk to save the data - startup and shut down times do not matter to me - i want fast use during working environment

3. Not sure about the use of a mount point / is it recommended to do so if installing apps on a ramdisk ?


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *wdgann*
> 
> superspeed is trail instead of free? How does it compare to softperfect?


Both SuperSpeed and Primo cost money and both have a trial.

You can usually accomplish similar result with SoftPerfect, you just need a little more effort.


----------



## levontraut

ok... i got ther AMD one up and running, now what do i use to bench it please?

i can only run 4 gig ... i would like to have done 16.


----------



## wdgann

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Both SuperSpeed and Primo cost money and both have a trial.
> 
> You can usually accomplish similar result with SoftPerfect, you just need a little more effort.


But softperfect doesn't let me use the unused ram of xp 32 bits


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *levontraut*
> 
> ok... i got ther AMD one up and running, now what do i use to bench it please?
> 
> i can only run 4 gig ... i would like to have done 16.


CrystalDiskMark is probably the most used.
There is also Anvil's, ATTO or AS SSD if it works for you

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *wdgann*
> 
> But softperfect doesn't let me use the unused ram of xp 32 bits


There is no free RAMDisk that I know that can use the unmanaged memory


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *theeohiostate*
> 
> Questions on usage.... I purchased the full version of Raxco Ram Disk and had a few question on setup/usage
> 
> 1. I have 64GB of DDR3 2400 memory - i run a lot of adobe-3d modeling-video editing software , how large of a Ram Disk should i set up ?
> 
> 2. I've read its good to put the OS pagefiles/temp files along with your browser cache on the RamDisk (especially since i'm using an ssd for my OS and browsers) , but what about creating a programs files folder on a large enough RamDisk and installing some of my more intense programs on it ? Ofc i would do manual or auto backups of the ramdisk to save the data - startup and shut down times do not matter to me - i want fast use during working environment
> 
> 3. Not sure about the use of a mount point / is it recommended to do so if installing apps on a ramdisk ?


1. Hard to say, if you really want to install your programs on it then make it as large as those need plus a few gigs to use as a work space.

2. I would absolutely move the temp folder, but with 64GB of RAM the pagefile should be rarely used so I'll probably only reduce it's size and not move it. For programs you s ohuld make sure they used the RAMDisk as their scratch disk/work space and for browsers just move their cache folder to the RAMDisk.

3. By mount point I assume you mean the RAMDisk drive letter. If you create folder on it (such as temp folder) or have programs installed on it I would make sure you assign it a permanent drive letter (you probably want to use a letter higher in the alphabet to make sure it doesn't interfere with windows should you had more hard disk at a latter time.


----------



## levontraut

this is very conflicting.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 Shizuku Edition x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 3401.636 MB/s
Sequential Write : 4428.757 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 3158.824 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 4238.999 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 304.874 MB/s [ 74432.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 271.530 MB/s [ 66291.4 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 291.527 MB/s [ 71173.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 269.816 MB/s [ 65873.1 IOPS]

Test : 50 MB [I: 0.0% (0.0/4084.0 MB)] (x1)
Date : 2013/09/16 17:41:42
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition [6.1 Build 7600] (x64)

corsair vengance 1866 4 X 8 sticks running at 1333 and the hd tune and AS SSD is also diffrent.


----------



## wdgann

Actually what is the different between how windows normally uses ram as caches and RAMDisks? There are ramcaches software out there too, are those useful? What doest ramdisk comparing to ssd and sshd?


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *wdgann*
> 
> Actually what is the different between how windows normally uses ram as caches and RAMDisks? There are ramcaches software out there too, are those useful? What doest ramdisk comparing to ssd and sshd?


I'm assuming you are referring to superfetch, because in XP windows didn't use RAM as aggressively.

Superfetch attempts to predict what programs you are likely to run an load them into memory, but it disable itself if Windows is installed on an SSD. RAMDisks are useful if you do a lot of writes as certain programs tend to do or if you do a lot of reads and the program is not able to map all the data in memory (either because it's a 32 bit program and the data is too large or because the code is bad)

RAMCache fonction in a similar way but they have some limitations. For example if you can't put your temp folder on a RAMCache to reduce the amounts of writes on your SSD.

You could try PrimoCache it has a 90 day trial and can use Invisible Memory on 32-bit Windows


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *levontraut*
> 
> this is very conflicting.
> 
> corsair vengance 1866 4 X 8 sticks running at 1333 and the hd tune and AS SSD is also diffrent.


I haven't tested it on AMD CPUs, but remember that crystal disk and most of those programs are single-threaded so the results are gonna be lower than what you would get with Intel.


----------



## wdgann

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> I'm assuming you are referring to superfetch, because in XP windows didn't use RAM as aggressively.
> 
> Superfetch attempts to predict what programs you are likely to run an load them into memory, but it disable itself if Windows is installed on an SSD. RAMDisks are useful if you do a lot of writes as certain programs tend to do or if you do a lot of reads and the program is not able to map all the data in memory (either because it's a 32 bit program and the data is too large or because the code is bad)
> 
> RAMCache fonction in a similar way but they have some limitations. For example if you can't put your temp folder on a RAMCache to reduce the amounts of writes on your SSD.
> 
> You could try PrimoCache it has a 90 day trial and can use Invisible Memory on 32-bit Windows


So windows 7 and 8 both have been using Superfetch to use as much free ram as possible by analysis user behaviors? Does this happen while windows starts or it keeps doing this behind hdd and ram?


----------



## TELVM

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> ... There is no free RAMDisk that I know that can use the unmanaged memory


Good 'ole Gavotte.

*Tom's - Up To 16 GB Of RAM On A 32-Bit System!*

*How to use full 4GB RAM in Windows 7 32 Bit (Gavotte RAMDisk in Windows 7)*


----------



## MrLinky

I want to say thanks, Brokenstorm, for taking the time to not only do all of this testing but also for answering everyone's questions. I know this was no easy nor quick task and I applaud you for not abandoning this thread in the face of seemingly low interest/feedback.

I don't do enough editing to need a RAMdisk right now, but I will remember this for when I do. +Rep


----------



## wdgann

if i have a lot of ram like 32gb, does superfetch already does the ramdisk job most of the time?

Is there way to set superfetch for programs in hdd while disable superfetch for sdd?


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *wdgann*
> 
> if i have a lot of ram like 32gb, does superfetch already does the ramdisk job most of the time?
> 
> Is there way to set superfetch for programs in hdd while disable superfetch for sdd?


To the best of my knowlegde the only way to configure Superfetch is to edit the registry key
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters

and change the value of EnablePrefetcher to one of these:
Disable Caching: 0
Cache Applications Only: 1
Cache Boot Files Only: 2
Cache Everything (default): 3

Also Superfetch doesn't speed up writes.

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *TELVM*
> 
> Good 'ole Gavotte.
> 
> *Tom's - Up To 16 GB Of RAM On A 32-Bit System!*
> 
> *How to use full 4GB RAM in Windows 7 32 Bit (Gavotte RAMDisk in Windows 7)*


Thanks for letting me know, I didn't test that one since I couldn't get a hold of the 64bits version


----------



## wdgann

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> To the best of my knowlegde the only way to configure Superfetch is to edit the registry key
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
> 
> and change the value of EnablePrefetcher to one of these:
> Disable Caching: 0
> Cache Applications Only: 1
> Cache Boot Files Only: 2
> Cache Everything (default): 3
> 
> Also Superfetch doesn't speed up writes.
> Thanks for letting me know, I didn't test that one since I couldn't get a hold of the 64bits version


how does ramdisk deal with write? write to ram first then ram to hdd with delay?


----------



## Sean Webster

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *wdgann*
> 
> Quote:
> 
> 
> 
> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> To the best of my knowlegde the only way to configure Superfetch is to edit the registry key
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters
> 
> and change the value of EnablePrefetcher to one of these:
> Disable Caching: 0
> Cache Applications Only: 1
> Cache Boot Files Only: 2
> Cache Everything (default): 3
> 
> Also Superfetch doesn't speed up writes.
> Thanks for letting me know, I didn't test that one since I couldn't get a hold of the 64bits version
> 
> 
> 
> how does ramdisk deal with write? write to ram first then ram to hdd with delay?
Click to expand...

it writes to ram only.

If you want before you shut down you can save the ramdisk and the contents as a ISO or similar file to the HDD. Some programs will up date to the HDD if you set it in the settings.


----------



## hmanlow

Question :

Radeon RAMdisk

increase SSD performance...?? proof ?????

OR NOTHING AT ALL???


----------



## Sean Webster

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *hmanlow*
> 
> Question :
> 
> Radeon RAMdisk
> 
> increase SSD performance...?? proof ?????
> 
> OR NOTHING AT ALL???


nothing at all.


----------



## hmanlow

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Sean Webster*
> 
> Quote:
> 
> 
> 
> Originally Posted by *hmanlow*
> 
> Question :
> 
> Radeon RAMdisk
> 
> increase SSD performance...?? proof ?????
> 
> OR NOTHING AT ALL???
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> nothing at all.
Click to expand...


----------



## Valus

My god, This thread is just full of win.

I've been messing with some of the software for awhile trying to get some results but you just nailed what I've been trying to do. i'll have to agree AMD systems don't get close to the benchmark results when I see intel systems running them. I've been testing on 3 of my main systems to try and find something to use on all of them.

Server: 2x12core @1.9Ghz, 16x4GB=64GB RAM 1333Mhz Quad Chan - Gets the worst Performance out of the 3
Office: 1x8core 8150 BE stock, 4x4GB = 16GB RAM, 1600Mhz Dual Chan - Mid, since I'm populating all 4 slots I cant run @2133 which the moduls support
Home: 1x8core 8350 BE stock, 2x8GB = 16GB RAM, 1866Mhz Dual Chan - Best performance but only because running at 1866, if I drope ddown to 1600 it would have same results as the office system.

I've noticed that the RAM freq makes a huge difference on performance, even when running ECC ramdisk's take a huge performance hit. I was originaly running with ECC on but tested slowly lowering the ECC lvl and to the point of just turning it off. I also bumped up RAM speed to the max of what the 2 opterons can handle which is 1333 being a 6100series, if I got a 6200/6300 I would then be bale to run at 1600 which I know would make a big jump in performace.

Also what I find interesting is, when I 1st installed softperfects ramdrive software I was able to benchmark it, Now after rebooting non of my systems can benchmark it using Crystal disk mark, I get a write protect error. not sure why it only happens with that ram software and between crystal mark.


----------



## prston

*Brokenstorn, THANK YOU for a very thorough and scientific study on RAMDisks....BUT YOU OVERLOOKED A CRITICAL CONSIDERATION!*

Based upon your research, I chose SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus. During the 14 day trial period, RamDisk Plus performed well and lived up to your test results. So, I forked over $80 to SuperSpeed for a license--AND THAT IS WHEN SHEER MISERY BEGAN!

Instead of sending a license in exchange for my money, SuperSpeed sent an email demanding a screenshot of my PC's name as shown in System Information. Also, SuperSpeed demanded additional private info that no other software vendor has ever asked or has a right to ask. Incredible! My jaw dropped reading that email. THEN the same email warned me to send the correct PC name, because the license will not work on any other PC with a different name!

Think about it, Folks! SuperSpeed's license not only limits you to one PC BUT ALSO LIMITS YOU TO THE SAME PC--FOREVER! Yes, I confirmed that. I wrote and asked 'what about when I get a new PC?' SuperSpeed's terse reply said I had to buy a new license for the new PC (even if the old PC is formatted and decommissioned).

Brokenstorm, so you see, RamDisk Plus delivered excellent performance based on your tests and my user experience. But sometimes there are other considerations beyond benchmarks that determine whether a software is truly good or not. In the case of SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus, a brutally harsh and invasive licensing system kills a very good software.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Thank you for your feedback, that is 1 thing I overlooked but it would be difficult for me to go through the purchase process for each of these programs.

Have you tried buying it from Raxco, I believe they are a reseller.


----------



## prston

*@Brokenstorm -- FURTHER PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS For Your Study & More INFO On SuperSpeed RAMDisk Plus*

No, it would be cost prohibitive to purchase all the RAMdisk software tested in your thorough 'research study'. That's why I posted my two cents regarding my experiences with purchasing RAMDisk Plus...to let others know what to expect from SuperSpeed and its insanely harsh licensing system.

I think another practical consideration to report is how well these RAMDisk software uninstall. SuperSpeed RamDisk Plus is a very 'dirty' software when uninstalling, leaving behind too much garbage in registry, App Data, & etc. It is definitely a software to uninstall with Revo Uninstaller Pro...to help clean up all the leftover crap.

THANK YOU for suggesting RAXCO as a 'reseller' source for RamDisk Plus.
Ha, ha, Raxco's sales page for RamDisk Plus does a much better job of explaining the software's virtues than SuperSpeed's own web page.

*UNFORTUNATELY, SuperSpeed already got my $80 last week....and I STILL HAVE NOT RECEIVED A LICENSE YET!*
I refuse to send a screenshot of my PC's System Info and to provide other private info that SuperSpeed demands before issuing a license. Those SuperSpeed TinHeads act like they are selling atomic secrets instead of a highly specialized, one-trick pony software. I have bought software since 1986....and I have seen all manner of licensing systems over the decades...but SuperSpeed's system is the most Nazi-like ever encountered!

Anyway, RamDisk Plus' trial period expired on my PC....so I uninstalled it...that's when I learned what a 'dirty' software it is.
Now I have to hassle with PayPal to get a refund of my money...since SuperSpeed ignores my emails requesting the license or a refund.

Brokenstorm, many thanks again for your brilliant and very scientific research on RAMDisk software.
I appreciate you.


----------



## prston

*@Brokenstorm -- YOUR ADVICE SORELY NEEDED & REQUESTED*

I think I present a somewhat unique application for RAMDisks. But I am thrashing about somewhat. Sure could use your input.

I am not sure if I really know what I am doing with regard to RAMDisks. My purpose for using a RAMDisk is not quite the same as what the folks here are doing with RAMDisks. So, I wonder if I am on the wrong track. Please let me explain my 'special situation'....and maybe you can tell me if I am chasing the right or wrong solution.

In 1999, I worked for a company that developed a software that does an awesome job of adding special effects to video clips...like, light years ahead of its time....and this software still kicks the azz of Adobe After Effects CS6 of today. The catch with this software is it is incredibly RAM intensive (for a 32 bit OS). Back then, 3GB of ordinary SDRAM would punk out on a Windows 2000 workstation and then Blue Screen. Only a workstation with 3GB of RAMBUS RDRAM could barely handle the software. (which is why the software pretty much flopped). Anyway, the company went belly up when Internet stocks blew up in 2000 and 2001. I ended up with a copy of this video FX software and I am trying to use it now.

The last OS this software will work on is XP Pro SP3 x32. I turned my W8.1 PC into a dual OS PC with XP. So, now I am bumping up against the XP x32 limit of 3GB RAM. And believe it or not, even Corsair Dominator DD3 is struggling a bit when capped at 3GB. (My PC has 12GB of Triple Channel DD3.) This Fx Video Software has Blue Screened me twice...for tapping out the RAM.

A colleague suggested that I create a RAMDisk in my 9 GB of 'unused' RAM to use as a Paging File for virtual RAM. I never heard of RAMdisks before that moment.
Then I read this 'feature' of RamDisk Plus at SuperSpeed's page:
"Enhanced Memory Access: RamDisk Plus uses patent-pending technology to access memory beyond the limitation imposed by a Windows 32-bit operating system. This means RamDisk Plus can use the "unmanaged" Windows memory (e.g. above 4GB). It can also use the stubbornly inaccessible memory between 3.2GB and 4GB."

I am not sure if I fully understand SuperSpeed's propaganda...but I read it to mean that somehow RamDisk Plus overcomes XP x32's limit of recognizing only 3 GB. But now I think it only means I can use the unused RAM as a Paging File. I don't know. But that is how I set up a single RAMDisk with RamDisk Plus: maxed out the RAMDisk at below 9GB and dedicated it all as a Paging File through XP System Properties - Performance Options - Advanced tab - Virtual Memory.
I can't definitely say whether or not that using RAMdisk as a Paging File in XP makes a difference...but while RamDisk Plus worked during the trial period, I was able to use the Fx video software and finish a project without the Blue Screen of Death. (Rotten dogs for not delivering the license.)

Brokenstorm, what do you think about my predicament?
Do you think that using a RAMdisk as a Paging File in a x32 OS really works?
If so, do you think it makes much of a performance difference versus using my SSD data drive for the Paging File?

NOW LET ME LEAVE YOU WITH A BIG BRAIN TEASER!

WILL A RAMdisk CREATED IN XP APPEAR IN W8 x64???
That is the million dollar question!
I don't want any of my 12GB of DD3 in W8 expended for a RAMdisk.
What do you think?
(I have not reinstalled W8 x64 yet. This mess with RAMdisks put my 'build' behind schedule. So, I have not discovered the answer by the hard way...of simply trying it.)

Let me profusely thank you upfront for your patience and any insights offered.
Best, Preston


----------



## Techie007

Here are my thoughts on this:


Virtual memory is virtual memory, so having a 12 GB pagefile on a RAM-disk will only improve _performance_ (not crashability) over a 12 GB pagefile on the HDD. It will not affect the amount of RAM available to your 32-bit system. If additional virtual memory keeps your application from crashing Windows, it shouldn't matter whether the pagefile is on the RAM-disk or on one of your HDDs. So, you might want to try a 12 GB pagefile on the HDD first, and see how that works for you before investing in the RAM-disk software.
Like most software, the RAM-disk software is installed with an OS, so the RAM-disk will only appear when booting that OS. You would probably have to purchase another license in order to use the software in another OS, even on the same computer. So no, the RAM-disk won't appear in your Windows 8 installation.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Obviously you have about 9GB of unused RAM if you run XP 32, and if your program is write intensive (which it probably is) it would be a better idea to move the Paging to the RamDisk to avoid trashing your SSD. There will be a performance improvement but it's hard to say how much.

2 OS can't share the same RamDisk, you will have to reinstall the RamDisk in Win8.The only way I can think of to have Win8 and WinXP share the same RamDisk is to install the RamDisk in Win 8, then run Win XP in a virtual machine with the RamDisk mapped as a network drive.

You should know that SuperSpeed is not the only program that can use the locked memory in win XP, Primo Ramdisk can as well.


----------



## prston

@ Techie007 -- Thank you for your guidance.

I moved the XP paging file to my internal Intel SSD (normally used as a data drive for video work).

I am not sure...but I don't think this high-power Fx video software is quite so happy with the new arrangement.
No BSOD yet. But the software now seems to stutter a bit in the rendering stage....which didn't occur while RamDisk Plus worked during the trial period (still no license delivered yet).

You are correct about SuperSpeed's requirement of purchasing a second license for W8...even though XP and W8 are installed in the same PC. Personally, I find that incredibly greedy and brutally harsh.
I have bought software since my first PC back in 1986....and I never ever ran across any software developer who would not allow the same license be used in both OS installed on the same PC. SuperSpeed's licensing policy totally flames me.

Anyway, thank you again!


----------



## prston

*@Brokenstorm -- Thank You...and?*

OK, thank you very much for letting me know that I am on the right track by using a RAMdisk for the XP paging file.
Again, I appreciate you.









Based on the current results of switching the paging file to an internal SSD, you seem to be correct. The RAMdisk is better.
So, I am trolling NewEgg and TigerDirect for more RAM to reserve for a RAMdisk paging file.

*SAY, I am a little confused by a possible contradiction between your thoughts and those of Techie007 on the matter of using a RAMdisk in a dual OS PC.*

Techie007 suggests that a RAMdisk created in XP won't appear when I boot over to the W8 side (when I install W8 soon). That's great. I prefer that....because I don't yet see a need for a RAMdisk in W8 x64 for what I do on a PC.

On the other hand, I am not quite sure if you are saying the same thing as Techie007.

*Brokenstorm, if I only want a RAMdisk on XP, would this be true:
1. The XP RAMdisk won't automatically appear in W8?
2. The XP RAMdisk won't somehow mess with W8's ability to recognize and use all 12 GB as available physical RAM?*

BTW, very astute guess about the Fx software being super write intensive.
And thank you for warning me about using my data SSD for the XP paging file. I didn't realize that I could trash an Intel SSD that way. What, does the paging file constantly use the same 'sector' (or whatever) on the SSD?

*Lastly...and sorry for being so chatty...may I ask what the heck you Overclockers use RAMdisks for?*

I see that the Read / Write speeds of a RAMdisk make even a SSD look like a snail in comparison. *But what can you really do with a RAMdisk?*
Like, RAM is volatile memory...so you wouldn't install software on a RAMdisk, would you? (Yes, I read where some RAMdisk software will back up a image before you shut down _normally_. Also, you wouldn't store data files on a RAMdisk, right?
PLUS, unless one has more money than Daddy Warbucks and can buy a mega-amount of expensive RAM, the relatively small size of a RAMdisk doesn't seem very practical for any sort of meaningful purpose.

Aside from use for a paging file, I just don't see the practical application for RAMdisks.
So, are you messing with RAMdisks for the same reason that people climb Mt. Everest....simply to see if you can do it...because it is there?

BTW, thank you very much for mentioning Primo RAMdisk as alternative to RamDisk Plus. I suspect that's where I will have to go. Things are getting very unhappy with SuperSpeed.

Very best regards,
Preston


----------



## Brokenstorm

That's correct, installing a RamDisk in Win XP will not affect your Win8 install.
The SSD should spread writes on it's own, but avoiding them altogether is even better.
Because we can








As more and more programs/games are becoming 64bits native the need for RamDisks decreases but if you want to most performance out of an old program/game just make it use the RamDisk.


----------



## prston

@ Professor Brokenstorm -- Thanks Mucho Again!

You did a fine job of setting me straight on RAMdisks. Let me guess....you are a computer science professor at MIT?









I kinda thought RAMdisks were mostly good for keeping alive old PCs, old OSs, and old software...which is about what I am using a RAMdisk for....because in a 64-bit world, I really don't see much purpose for them. Along with that thought, I must also think that most RAMdisk software developers are overly proud of their software.. serving a very specialized purpose in a shrinking market niche....but still charging a high price for their one-trick ponies.

Anyways, I totally agree with 'Because You Can'....which is probably why I really do it too!

Many kudos, Brokenstorm...for bringing me and many others up to speed on RAMdisks!


----------



## Snakecharmed

Some informal test results:

August 16, 2011: 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24 using Dataram RAMDisk 3.5.130R18 (4GB FAT32)


January 25, 2014: 16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24 using SoftPerfect RAM Disk 3.4.4 (8GB NTFS)


January 25, 2014: 32GB (4x8GB) Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3-1600 9-9-9-24 using SoftPerfect RAM Disk 3.4.4 (8GB NTFS)


I realized afterwards that I failed to keep all my variables controlled, but I just tested again now (no screenshots) with a 2GB data block instead of the 1GB used in the last two screenshots and there was no appreciable difference. From the first screenshot to the second, I was benchmarking to see the difference between the RAM disk software, then benchmarking to see if there was any performance difference in my RAM upgrade from the second screenshot to the third. SoftPerfect RAM Disk simply performs much better than Dataram RAMDisk, especially in reads and 4K random writes.

Thanks to Brokenstorm for the comprehensive testing and essentially introducing me to SoftPerfect RAM Disk, especially since I needed something to replace the free Dataram RAMDisk when I decided to go up to 8GB.


----------



## kindergip

baNG CRASH THUMP....hmmphh, any comment box you can type into means you've done something right.

RAMDISKS: Wow. Been using DATARAM sorta half heartedly. Made 4GB into a ready boost. Didn't think about adding
temp files and stuff. Probably too much work at first blush. I see where there are a couple of dollars wanted for adding
4, 8 or even 16GB to the FREE versions of straight RAMDISKS.

Okay, here's my situation. I built a workstation on a server motherboard base. Had a power issue coupled with a heat
issue and then some major system instability. Suffice to say there is a new motherboard installed now and the road to recovery
promises to be a fairly long one. While I am making that journey I have been looking at enhancements to better use
the resources I have.

The system is a dual [email protected], 72GB RAM, 660 GTX 2GB, and several Terrabytes of spinners.

The main drive is a 300GB [email protected] - one of those forever industrial models.

I have a USB3.0 32GB stick dedicated to ReadyBoost.

To replace the SAS drive with an SSD would cost $250-$499.

I have an SSD in my Amiga X1000 and in my laptop so I know how fast they are.
In the old days I ran a RAD disk on my Amiga and stuffed the entire OS into
a 2M recoverable ramdisk that survived soft reboots/restarts.

1) My problem is that I am still crashing on a semi regular basis as I bring my box around
to reliability. I would like to have things come back to the condition they were in just before
I lost them as I am now able to use the machine fairly hard.

2) Also my usual workflow involves hundreds of 3D files (29GB's) being assembled in a setting using
an application called POSER.

3) I also do digital manipulation of photographs using DXO, BIBBLE and PICTURE WINDOW PRO.
Despite 12M RAWS my photo files are in the 100GB range now.

4) my browser often has 35 tabs which represents a full thought when I am researching something.

I didn't grow up on Windows though I use it everyday. I could use a little guidance on what I need
to use or how I should be using a RAMDISK to get a little more out of my setup in these circumstances.

I don't want to buy an SSD until the next permanent price drop or reliability increase milestone.

My thought now is a 24GB RAMDISK with the most configurable feature set.

So, if anyone has any ideas or thoughts on the best RAMDISK for this or the steps to building
or constructing something I'd be all ears.


----------



## Brokenstorm

You may be waiting a long time if you are waiting for SSD to improve in performance. The better one already saturate SATA 3.0, so until motherboards start to support SATA Express there won't be much performance improvement on that front. And since Intel cancelled SATA Express support for Broadwell then I don't think there will be widespread SATA Express support before mid/late 2016.

On the price side I would be surprised to see price below 0.50$/GB in the near future.
As far as reliability it don't think there will be a breakthrough anytime soon, the market is pushing for lower prices and don't care or even understand the differences in reliability which is why SLC SSDs are now so rare.

It's hard to recommend a RamDisk if you are still suffering instabilities. You might want to look into those you do synchronous backups.
I about the redo my testing so I'll be able to give you a better suggestion when I'm done.


----------



## Toddskins

Hi BrokenStorm,

I just read through this entire thread, and the type of work involved with a Ram Disk is typically very technical and so the majority of people who do not have the technical prowess to take advantage and understand how to take advantage of a Ram Disk (people like me) need something additional in a thread like this, if I may say so.

You could use me as an example to teach others. I'll ask my questions in a manner so that other people will learn by seeing my questions, as well as the answers I hope you will provide. Here are the following assumptions:

A) I'm a musician and wish to use a Ram Drive to speed up the processing of my music recording software (DAW) because latency is the musician's enemy. I'm toying with Ram Drive software to see if I can reduce latency while recording.

B) I have 32 GB of 1866 Ram in my Z97 motherboard using a new 4790K cpu. I have a 500 GB SSD as my install for Windows 7 Pro 64-bit, and two additional 1TB HDDs in my new system.

C) I'm not at all concerned with the volatility of a Ram Drive. I'm personally smart enough to save my work often while working.

D) My Cakewalk Sonar X3 Producer software requires 20 GB of storage space, and creates several sub-folders in the process!!! This is going to be an issue I need help on.

Questions:

1) Do I load the entire 20 GB of the DAW software in Ram Drive in order to use the software, or only 1 of the several folders containing the executable file?

Please address this type of issue to help us understand the dilemmas and get into the nitty gritty of how best to use a Ram Drive.

2) We hope to be able to automatically load our browsers' cache and temp files into the Ram Drive because regardless of the type of work we do, we constantly search the Web while working. So how many GB should we allot into the Ram Drive if, as in my case, I switch back & forth between two browsers (IE 11 and Chrome)?

Further, it you don't wish to type all the details on how to adjust these settings to load the browser software into Ram Drive, maybe you can supply links where such answers are provided.

3) When I am finished using my DAW software application and I exit out of it, explain to us what then happens. The software is still residing in RAM, yes? How do you empty it from RAM, or should you just leave it alone there if that is the primary use of my Ram Drive?

Explain the interaction between the software in RAM and the same software sitting on the SSD C-Drive. What do we need to understand is happening between the original and the Virtual? I've read mention of ISO image files (Yikes, I have no desire to learn all about that). Do we need to learn about ISO image files as part of the learning curve to take advantage of a Ram Drive?

4) If the file you are working on is in the Ram Drive when you click SAVE in the application, we should then click SAVE AS occasionally to save it to our SSD or HDD, right? Or I suppose you can configure the application software where to save as its normal place of saving the file to a HDD, but then it would not be taking advantage of the Ram speed would it?

Getting answers to these types of Questions would help the not-so-technically knowledgeable end-user.

Thanks,


----------



## Brokenstorm

1) It depend what you mean by requires 20 GB of storage space. If you are talking about the size of the install folder then no there should be no need to load it onto the RAMDisk. There should be little to no writes happening there and the software should be able to load the files it needs without affecting latency.

That being said, I'm not familiar with the software. You may want to monitor the install folder using a tool such as Process Monitor to see for yourself, but I would bet that the majority of the reads will take place when you launch the software and/or at the start of a recording/editing.

If the programs requires 20GB of work space the best thing to use would be RAM, but maybe the program still is 32bits in which case there might be a benefit in making it use the RAMDisk.

2) If you only want to keep the cache of the current session I would say 2-3GB should be enough, but if you want to save it to disk and reuse it then you should add the max cache size of both browsers.

I don't use IE or Chrome on a regular basis, but there is 2 way to go about moving the cache to a RAMDisk. Either by configuring it in software or by moving the folder to the RAMDisk using a symbolic link.

The second option is easier and will work for all browser. For Chrome it would look something like this:
mklink /d "C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data" "Z:\Chrome Cache"

3) Every program that is closed will remain in RAM (Free Page list) and should be zeroed fairly quickly. If you have Superfetch enabled it will use it to pre-load whatever it feels you may need.
Whether you launched the program from a SSD or RAMDisk doesn't change anything in that regard.
The reference to ISO was only an example of an extention a RAMDisk may use when it backups its data to disk, you shouldn't worry about it.

4) If you aren't going to need the file again there is no need to save it to a RAMDisk. The file is in memory and the OS will write it to disk as fast as it can, there is no need for a middleman.

If the file is going to be edited again, then it would make sense to save it to the RAMDisk and configure it to regularly backup to disk.


----------



## tiro_uspsss

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Toddskins*
> 
> *snip*


why not get one of those PCIE NVMe Intel SSDs? These:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8147/the-intel-ssd-dc-p3700-review-part-2-nvme-on-client-workloads


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *tiro_uspsss*
> 
> why not get one of those PCIE NVMe Intel SSDs? These:
> 
> http://www.anandtech.com/show/8147/the-intel-ssd-dc-p3700-review-part-2-nvme-on-client-workloads


Those aren't available yet.


----------



## tiro_uspsss

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Those aren't available yet.


duh









I didn't read a time frame that Toddskins was wanting a solution in, so hey, why not suggest?


----------



## mccollums

Great thread and great timing for me to stumble on it.

Brokenstorm - I appreciate all the effort you have put into this. Very impressive.

I'd like to run a few things by the posters on this thread.

Goal: Speed up our EHR application running on our Dell Poweredge r610s with Xenapp 6.5.

There's alot of moving parts to the application between the subpar code, network, database, OS, storage etc..etc.. I don't want to get into the parts and baselines and benchmarks. I just want to focus on the using a RAMdisk to speed up the application.

Here's what I've tried.. Disk backed Atlantis computing ILIO. Also, a Ubuntu server with NFS exporting the tmpfs RAM drive (this was on VMWare ESXi 5.5) - I was disappointed in the numbers using HDTune Pro and Crystal Disk Mark. Atantis is really cool but we could not take advantage of the full power of the application since we only have Xenapp 6.5 Advanced edition. I don't have the numbers handy on these because I have the VMs shutdown right now. I do remember the Ubuntu solution having performance similar to an SSD drive.

My latest idea was to try HyperV, and install the VM on a large RAM drive. I have focused on Primo and SoftPerfect mainly.
Primo was eliminated because of a memory leak on both the HyperV server and the Xenapp server. Not sure why.. also peformance was 15-20% slower then SoftPerfect. To keep this post as short as possible... i'm trying to keep the history short.

Here's where I'm at right now -
Hardware Poweredge r610 - single 2.4ghz e5620 Quad core with 64gb memory. will double check but I think memory running at 1333mhz- maybe 1066, but i think i'm confusing memory and the bus?
Softperfect 40Gb RAM Z: drive installed on Server 2012 R2 HyperV server. (image backed) NTFS - 4kb
35Gb VHD of one of my Xenapp servers

Crystal Disk Score of HyperV Z drive

Anvil score:


Crystal Disk Score of Xenapp VM C drive


The performance degrades a great deal when installing the OS on the VM. I did try disk pass through on HyperV and it was mildly better, but not worth it since the disk has to be offlien to the hypervisor.
I decided to put a 2gb RAM drive ON THE VM.. what the hell, OS drive is pretty fast, but why not put my app on a RAM drive inside the VM? numbers below..


Application is definitely faster in this environment. There's a few things holding it back... some I can improve, some I can't.

Here's the question though...
Dell Poweredge processor has 3 channels and 6 memory slots per CPU. Do you think it will help to populate all 3 channels? Currently have 4 sticks in channel 1 and 2. My guess is the processor is the bottleneck - so I'm thinking about buying another processor and possibly more memory to populate all 3 channels.

Scenario 1: buy another 2.4 ghz and 2 more sticks of RAM. all 3 channels will be populated on both sides - 1 stick per channel per processor. total memory: 96gb

Scenario 2: buy a 3.6ghz x5687 quad - 2 more sticks of RAM - and have all 3 channels populated with 2 16gb sticks. 2nd processor slot and dimm slots empty.

Which scenario will get better performance from the RAM drive(s).... ?



Getting ready to head to the data center.. finished reading a Dell Low latency guide and the following recommendations were made...


----------



## Brokenstorm

In my experience the processor is always the bottleneck.
Right now your memory is running in dual-channel configuration, and while populating all 6 slot would increase your memory bandwidth it won't improve your Ramdisk performance. Though it may help with some memory hungry applications.

So I would go with Scenario 2 because Scenario 1 will give you the same results you are getting right now.


----------



## mccollums

Thanks for your input. I was leaning that way and have already ordered a 3.6gbz processor.

I did go to the data center and adjust some of the processor settings and got some pretty interesting results.

I set the Power Management to maximum performance and disabled C1E and C-states.

On the HyperV host - Crystal Disk Mark was about the same. Anvil took a nice overall jump.


Running the tests on the VM running inside the RAM drive was a different story. Nice jump on both.
C Drive of the VM...


Z local RAM drive on the VM


I will post the numbers after I install the 3.6ghz.


----------



## kevindd992002

Is using a RAMDisk for the cache of both IE and FireFox really better than just keeping them in my Samsung 840 Pro SSD?


----------



## Blameless

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> In my experience the processor is always the bottleneck.
> Right now your memory is running in dual-channel configuration, and while populating all 6 slot would increase your memory bandwidth it won't improve your Ramdisk performance.


I've always been able to translate more memory bandwidth into better RAMdisk performance.

RAMdisk performance is still limited by overhead and the fact that most are only single threaded, but they should still scale to some degree with any measurable increase in memory read/write bandwidth.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kevindd992002*
> 
> Is using a RAMDisk for the cache of both IE and FireFox really better than just keeping them in my Samsung 840 Pro SSD?


It's faster, but possibly imperceptibly so. It will also reduce the wear on your SSD slightly, but again probably not enough to make a real difference.

Firefox can be setup to cache almost everything to memory itself with the settings in the about:config page.


----------



## kevindd992002

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless*
> 
> It's faster, but possibly imperceptibly so. It will also reduce the wear on your SSD slightly, but again probably not enough to make a real difference.
> 
> Firefox can be setup to cache almost everything to memory itself with the settings in the about:config page.


Wouldn't it be better though if cache is saved for next time use since it'll be faster to just load from cache setting aside security?


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless*
> 
> I've always been able to translate more memory bandwidth into better RAMdisk performance.


Of course, but the performance improvement you'll get from faster RAM is neglegible compared to the linear increase you get from increasing the processor clock speed.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless*
> 
> RAMdisk performance is still limited by overhead and the fact that most are only single threaded, but they should still scale to some degree with any measurable increase in memory read/write bandwidth.


Pretty much all the RAMdisk are multi-threaded, but few programs actually use multiple threads to read data. Which is understandable since it would trash performance on spinning hard drives.
The overhead is negligible, it's certainly lower than SATA and I'm pretty sure it's lower than NVMe too.

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kevindd992002*
> 
> Wouldn't it be better though if cache is saved for next time use since it'll be faster to just load from cache setting aside security?


Assuming you don't reboot your computer or set the RAMdisk to save on shutdown, yes.
Also I've never been able to make firefox use more than 2GB for memory cache. If you need more than this you'll have to also use disk cache.


----------



## kevindd992002

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Of course, but the performance improvement you'll get from faster RAM is neglegible compared to the linear increase you get from increasing the processor clock speed.
> Pretty much all the RAMdisk are multi-threaded, but few programs actually use multiple threads to read data. Which is understandable since it would trash performance on spinning hard drives.
> The overhead is negligible, it's certainly lower than SATA and I'm pretty sure it's lower than NVMe too.
> Assuming you don't reboot your computer or set the RAMdisk to save on shutdown, yes.
> Also I've never been able to make firefox use more than 2GB for memory cache. If you need more than this you'll have to also use disk cache.


Well, I usually set the cache of both IE and Firefox to just 50MB but for some reason IE still bypasses that limit and goes way past over it so I set my RAMDisk to around 512MB. Are those limits too low for a cache?


----------



## TELVM

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kevindd992002*
> 
> Is using a RAMDisk for the cache of both IE and FireFox really better than just keeping them in my Samsung 840 Pro SSD?


If you want a lightning quick browser experience, place _the whole browser_ in a ramdisk. I use *Pale Moon Portable* on a vanishing Primo Ramdisk (autosaved to HDD on shutdown, autoloaded to ramdisk on start up).


----------



## kevindd992002

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *TELVM*
> 
> If you want a lightning quick browser experience, place _the whole browser_ in a ramdisk. I use *Pale Moon Portable* on a vanishing Primo Ramdisk (autosaved to HDD on shutdown, autoloaded to ramdisk on start up).


Oh ok. But only portable browsers can be done with this, right? If I use Pale Moon also and save it in a RAMDisk, where does it save the cache?


----------



## mccollums

Here's the difference after I installed the 3.6ghz Xeon compared to the 2.4ghz Xeon..

there were a total of 3 different RAMDISK benchmarks.

HyperV hypervisor local ram drive.
VM installed on that RAM drive C:
Local RAM drive installed on the VM Z:

I only have the before on the Hypervisor ram drive.. I wiped out the server and forgot to save the numbers after the 3.6ghz processor. But they were almost exactly the same as the local RAM drive on the VM.

First number. VM C: drive. 2.4GHZ processor set at max performance and C1E and Cstates disabled.


Second.. VM C: Drive 3.6ghz processor same bios settings.


third VM Z: drive - local ram disk on the VM 2.4ghz


fourth VM Z: drive - local ram disk on the VM 3.6ghz


I do remember the anvil number on the hypervisor C drive.. 44,000 for the 2.4ghz and 56,000 with the 3.6ghz...


----------



## kevindd992002

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kevindd992002*
> 
> Oh ok. But only portable browsers can be done with this, right? If I use Pale Moon also and save it in a RAMDisk, where does it save the cache?


BUMP on this.


----------



## Brokenstorm

You could achieve similar results with the normal desktop version, but the portable version already is configured to leave no traces on your system.
The disk cache is probably disabled and there may be other limitations. I'm not sure that it would be much faster than a properly configured browser, but like TELVM said if you just want your browser to be as fast as possible it may be what you are looking for.


----------



## Blameless

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Of course, but the performance improvement you'll get from faster RAM is neglegible compared to the linear increase you get from increasing the processor clock speed.


I don't see a linear increase from processor clock speed, not even close, at least not at the speeds I run my CPU at. Indeed, pure ramdisk to ramdisk copies, or most benchmarks don't load any core more than 80-90%, so CPU clock shouldn't be the limiting factor.

However, I _do_ see an almost linear improvement from faster memory speed from DDR3-1600 to 2133, if I keep all other factors the same. This is on a 4.4GHz 3930k.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Pretty much all the RAMdisk are multi-threaded, but few programs actually use multiple threads to read data. Which is understandable since it would trash performance on spinning hard drives.
> The overhead is negligible, it's certainly lower than SATA and I'm pretty sure it's lower than NVMe too.


Spinning platter HDDs have had NCQ and have thus seen performance advantages from multiple threads and/or high queue depths for upwards of a decade.

ImDisk performs near the top of the RAMdrive software I have tried an I'm fairly certain it's single threaded. Most disk benchmarks peak right around 60-70% of what I can get out of a single threaded memory benchmark, and using robocopy shows virtually no performance difference between 1,2, 6, 12, or 18 threads.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless*
> 
> I don't see a linear increase from processor clock speed, not even close, at least not at the speeds I run my CPU at. Indeed, pure ramdisk to ramdisk copies, or most benchmarks don't load any core more than 80-90%, so CPU clock shouldn't be the limiting factor.
> 
> However, I _do_ see an almost linear improvement from faster memory speed from DDR3-1600 to 2133, if I keep all other factors the same. This is on a 4.4GHz 3930k.


That's because you won't get more than 12800 MB/s with 1600MHz DIMMs no matter how fast your CPU is. Your memory was the bottleneck, if you try changing you CPU speed now you should see the effect.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless*
> 
> ImDisk performs near the top of the RAMdrive software I have tried an I'm fairly certain it's single threaded. Most disk benchmarks peak right around 60-70% of what I can get out of a single threaded memory benchmark, and using robocopy shows virtually no performance difference between 1,2, 6, 12, or 18 threads.


I would say it's not single threaded, you'll get a lot more IOPS if you throw multiple threads at it but you won't get faster speed than you would from a single-threaded sequential read/write. At least not when copying large files.


----------



## Blameless

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> That's because you won't get more than 12800 MB/s with 1600MHz DIMMs no matter how fast your CPU is. Your memory was the bottleneck, if you try changing you CPU speed now you should see the effect.


It's a quad channel memory controller, and all channels are filled (there is also no way for software not to use a populated channel). Multi-threaded memory benchmarks push 24-60GB/s depending on the type of test. There is no reduction RAM disk performance unless I reduce my CPU clock considerably.

I've also never seen anywhere near 12GB/s out of any RAM disk software. In my preferred software (ImDisk), I get roughly 6GB/s read and 8GB/s write (sequential) at my normal DDR3-1866 CL8 settings.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> I would say it's not single threaded, you'll get a lot more IOPS if you throw multiple threads at it but you won't get faster speed than you would from a single-threaded sequential read/write. At least not when copying large files.


I'll try a pile of tiny files and compare times.


----------



## Invisius

Thanks for doing all the legwork, I've been toying around with a bunch SSDs in various RAID setups on my X99 build. This just makes it even sweeter!

Test system: http://valid.x86.fr/mgprs1
Samsung 850 Pro 512MB in RAID 0

Primocache really impressed me with its ability to intelligently throw programs like this into RAM. Here's my result


----------



## Blameless

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless*
> 
> I'll try a pile of tiny files and compare times.


Update on this.

I copied ~34,000 4k files from one 4GiB ImDisk RAMdrive to another (both exFAT, 4k cluster size, destination drive formatted before and after each test) once with thread count set to 1, and once with thread count set to 6.

It took much longer than I was expecting for this operation to complete and the test with six threads took almost twice as long as the test with one thread. CPU utilization was definitely higher than with large files or sequential tests, with robocopy.exe completely saturating a logical core with one thread, which seemed to indicate a CPU bottleneck. However, six threads did not increase total CPU load at all, it just spread a lesser load over more threads.

It should also be noted that benchmarks like CrystalDiskMark primarily load the Windows "System" service, because this is what ImDisk uses, and the service never goes over ~8.33% utilization with twelve logical cores, strongly implying that it's a single threaded program. Sequential tests load "System" heavily ~(7-8% of total, or 80-90% of one logical core) and "CrystalDiskMark.exe" almost not at all. 4k (QD:32) tests max out "CrystalDiskMark.exe", but put less load on "system". Plain 4k (QD:1) tests put very little load on either process.

Tentative conclusions:

1. ImDisk is single threaded.

2. Larger block sizes are more demanding at the same queue depth than smaller ones.

3. A 4.4GHz Sandy Bridge core with quad channel DDR3 is limited by the memory itself, not CPU core or uncore speed, in sequential CrystalDiskMark tests.

4. The same setup is probably limited by core (or uncore) clocks in high QD 4k transfers, at least with a RAMdrive that can only make use of a single CPU thread.

5. What the limiting factor would be, quad DDR3-1866, or six hyperthreaded SB cores, for a multi-threaded RAM drive, will require further testing.

6. Robocopy has a lot of overhead.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless*
> 
> It should also be noted that benchmarks like CrystalDiskMark primarily load the Windows "System" service, because this is what ImDisk uses, and the service never goes over ~8.33% utilization with twelve logical cores, strongly implying that it's a single threaded program. Sequential tests load "System" heavily ~(7-8% of total, or 80-90% of one logical core) and "CrystalDiskMark.exe" almost not at all. 4k (QD:32) tests max out "CrystalDiskMark.exe", but put less load on "system". Plain 4k (QD:1) tests put very little load on either process.


CrystalDiskMark only use one thread to run all its benchmark, you should use a multithreaded benchmark tool (like IOmeter or Anvil's benchmark) to get more relevant results. For me CrystalDiskMark maxes out one core for all the benchmarks and "System" stays almost idle, but I'm using another RamDisk program.

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless*
> 
> It's a quad channel memory controller, and all channels are filled (there is also no way for software not to use a populated channel). Multi-threaded memory benchmarks push 24-60GB/s depending on the type of test. There is no reduction RAM disk performance unless I reduce my CPU clock considerably.


My understanding was that since RamDisks lock memory at a driver level they can't take advantage of multiple channel memory as it would require them to be able to map themselves in RAM so that they are spread across those memory channel and it would also require that they keep track of that memory. I may be wrong but I've never seen anyone get results faster than the bandwidth of a single memory channel.

For some reason there seems to be a lot of variability in Ramdisk performance, I've seen people get >12,000MB/s and I've seen people with system that leaves mine in the dust barely get faster results than mine.


----------



## Blameless

I'll try Anvil's benchmark.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> My understanding was that since RamDisks lock memory at a driver level they can't take advantage of multiple channel memory as it would require them to be able to map themselves in RAM so that they are spread across those memory channel and it would also require that they keep track of that memory. I may be wrong but I've never seen anyone get results faster than the bandwidth of a single memory channel.


Memory addresses are normally spread evenly across memory channels and the OS itself rarely knows how addresses are physically mapped to hardware. Most versions of Windows have no knowledge of memory topology at the channel level.

It would be vastly more difficult to keep a RAMdrive on one channel than for it to fill all of them, and it would badly degrade system performance for everything else if this were done.

Reducing memory speed or removing too many sticks of memory definitely has an impact on RAMDrive performance, in my experience.


----------



## Blameless

Well, Anvil is definitely mutli-threaded and ImDisk is definitely not.

My Anvil and CrystalDiskMark scores are very similar, and the pattern of "system" usage leads me to the same conclusions: I'm memory controller/bandwidth limited with the larger test blocks, but CPU limited in high QD tests, because ImDisk's driver cannot load more than a single thread.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless*
> 
> Well, Anvil is definitely mutli-threaded and ImDisk is definitely not.


Let's say you're right and ImDisk's driver is single-threaded, then it's probable that the drivers of all the RamDisks are single-threaded and that would explain why they can only take advantage of 1 memory channel.

Still, many of them will scale differently when many threads are thrown at them. Some won't scale at all and other will have almost linear scaling.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless*
> 
> Reducing memory speed or removing too many sticks of memory definitely has an impact on RAMDrive performance, in my experience.


When I did my test at 2.67GHz the CPU speed was the only thing that would affect performance, guess I should try to get a high clocked Haswell and see if it's still the case.


----------



## larsch

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> Let's say you're right and ImDisk's driver is single-threaded, then it's probable that the drivers of all the RamDisks are single-threaded and that would explain why they can only take advantage of 1 memory channel.


Single/dual/quad channel is independent of the number of threads. The memory address determines what channel you are accessing. The memory controller spreds them out over all the channels (like RAID) So a single thread reading memory addresses contiguously will hit all channels.


----------



## Blameless

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> When I did my test at 2.67GHz the CPU speed was the only thing that would affect performance, guess I should try to get a high clocked Haswell and see if it's still the case.


Yeah, any discussion of CPU limitation needs to be in relation to the performance of the CPU in question.

I'm certain I'd see a performance hit if I knocked more than a GHz off my CPU clock.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *larsch*
> 
> Single/dual/quad channel is independent of the number of threads. The memory address determines what channel you are accessing. The memory controller spreds them out over all the channels (like RAID) So a single thread reading memory addresses contiguously will hit all channels.


This is true, but multithreaded loads are often needed to be able to make the memory subsystem the limiting factor. A quad channel memory controller designed too feed six to twelve cores is rarely going to be saturated by the memory requests from a single thread.


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *larsch*
> 
> Single/dual/quad channel is independent of the number of threads. The memory address determines what channel you are accessing. The memory controller spreds them out over all the channels (like RAID) So a single thread reading memory addresses contiguously will hit all channels.


Thank you for the correction.

I think I found a benchmark that would illustrate the maximum bandwidth for 1 thread.
Sequential RAM Scanning Bandwidth
http://panthema.net/2013/pmbw/
http://panthema.net/2013/pmbw/results.html


----------



## Blameless

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Brokenstorm*
> 
> I think I found a benchmark that would illustrate the maximum bandwidth for 1 thread.


RightMark's Multit-threaded Memory Test will let you compare performance of any number of threads from 1 to 8. Been using it for quite some time to illustrate that single threaded programs will rarely saturate modern memory subsystems.

The images in this album, dated Feb 5, 2013, show the performance at each thread count on my first 3930k setup: http://www.overclock.net/g/a/45124/benchmarks/

Performance starts to plateau around four threads, and a single thread offers less than a third of the peak reached with 6-8 threads.


----------



## hhuey5

Which ramdisk autosaves during usage, autoloads from hdd and also dynamically shrinks as your programs need more memory?

I heard Raxio also has a ramdisk program as well

Its been a long time since I used ramdisk because the programs I use need lots of memory and in those days you had to choose a certain profile as to when you wanted or didn't want ramdisk

I hope there are better ones now?


----------



## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *hhuey5*
> 
> Which ramdisk autosaves during usage, autoloads from hdd and also dynamically shrinks as your programs need more memory?


None of the ones I tested could dynamically shrink or expand.
Dataram, Gilisoft, Primo, RamPhantomEX and WinRamTech all have synchronous backups and most of the others have periodic backups.

If those don't do what you need, you might want to take a look at PrimoCache


----------



## quipers

I tried SoftPerfect's ramdisk 2 years ago around the time this thread got started. I found it buggy. There was no clear way to completely uninstall it that I could find, and their tech staff didn't reliably respond to questions posted in their support forum. I ended up having to reformat my Windows hard drive.
They've scrubbed some of those old support forum threads form their website since then (still visible in Wayback Machine archive though).

Of course, it's free software, so you get what you pay for, I guess.


----------



## SE65535

This is just a note on my recent experience with DR DataRam (product RamDisk).

I purchased several personal licenses (v4.4.0.32) as the free product seemed fine, it does work well. I decided to pay the $ per copy for the larger version as I do like to pay for development, and the paid version allows for saving of the data (not sure what triggers, intervals or if real-time).

Well all seemed fine after the pruchases of the licenses. I tested it (OS, USER TMP, IE Temp, symbolic link Chrome temp files, etc) on a test VM and was ready to "move" it to my main browsing VM. So I looked for an un-register (un-Redeem) button, to de-allocate the license key from the test machine, but the software does not have a method to do that. So, I uninstalled the software, as one would think this might deactivate the key during the uninstall process. Now I did all this and it is probably unnecessary according to their FAQs. Their FAQs say that Ver 4+ will simply allow a Redeem License action on another machine, effectively Un-Redeeming it from the previous machine (how ever they want to implement their license management is fine, as long as it works). Well all of this sounds fine in writing, but it doesn't work. Their license server give an error (time and time again). So what does this mean to a purchasing user? It means, think before you pay for this product.

It means that you will install your license one time, and one time only, on ONE OS instance, and you will never move that license to another machine. So if you are going to test a paid/licensed version DR DataRam RamDisk on a test machine/vm, don't expect to ever move the license (to get the license benefits). You have lost your license to that one machine. This unexpected headache is all contrary to their stated FAQs, but just because something is written in a FAQ (that you read before purchase) doesn't make it true. I will be going after refunds via my payment provider.

The FAQs say that pre-v4 licenses can be reset by a support ticket. So to be fair, and go the extra mile, I created a support ticket fully explaining the situation and listing my several transactions and associated keys. I have not yet received response of any kind (auto or manual). Not even a confirmation email that the support ticket was received (although the page presented after the submission does show the support ticket # created). I have also opened up a Customer Support ticket asking about the initial license reset ticket, and I have received no response at the time of writing this.

I would strongly suggest that you consider all of this before doing business with them. When you go to the trouble of buying a license, because it is the right thing to do, and then you realize that they have workflow/support/licensing issues, you need to cut you ties and move on, and I will. This thread was very useful is showing me alternatives. I am hoping that none of the vendors listed behave in the same manner, especially with respect to licensing. I don't mind paying, even up to $50 (per install), for a ramdisk that works right.

After writing the above, I did surprisingly receive the following via email (so there is some sort of a system in place, contrary to what I initially noted above):
_I have reset your license key. *RAMDisk personal licenses are for one computer only and not transferrable. The license is issued and the hardware IDs are captured to insure that only one system can use the license*. Sometimes these IDs are generated by Windows and change from version to version. These would definitely change on a VM.
_

It would appear that they left out the word, "EVER" and it should be:
_RAMDisk personal licenses are for one computer only and not transferrable. The license is issued and the hardware IDs are captured to insure that only one system can use the license, *EVER*._

If I pay for a license, I expect to be able to "move" it from one machine to another. I am not a Window95 user using the same OS instance from 20 years ago.

What they are saying here in their response, is that, the info that they posted in their FAQ is incorrect (intentional or not) and if you want to ever use your key on another machine (i.e. moving from a test machine to your regular use machine), you must pay commercial unrestricted licensing price (great the wife, kids and grandma will love to hear that, sorry you are stuck on Windows 95, forever, DR DataRam says so). They did respond to my reset request, but will they in the future, who knows.

I will not do this kind of thing for personal use (this is equivalent to mainframe software licensing). This would be the only company to ever have put this kind of restriction on my personal PC OS use, in 25+ years of purchasing software. When I re-install my OS, other vendors don't complain, and MS doesn't complain. I never run two copies of the software with one license and I expect cooperation from the vendor, MS gives this. As a software developer myself, I understand their concern, and that is why I went to the effort of purchasing keys, instead of obtaining a license key cracker/generator. Developers should be paid. But playing games with the stated pre-sale terms, us unacceptable.

I am offf to try the top 3 ramdisks listed in this thread. If any of you readers know that they too play these kinds of games with licensing, please let me know asap. I will do a full trial before purchasing keys, but I don't expect any purchased key to be bound-for-life to any particular CPU/OS/Motherboard.

Thanks for the info in this thread, it has been very useful. I hope my observations will help others as well.


----------



## SE65535

A follow-up after escalating the issue today.

After pointing out clearly the conflicting terms of their licensing, support response, and licensing server behavior, I did ask for a refund for the keys that I purchased The vendor (DR DataRam) granted this refund rather quickly and I am removing the software keys from my machines (I would expect that their license server will have invalidated the keys them as well).

So while the licensing is conflicting and the vendor is a bit slow to reply (until escalated) they did finally respond and honored my refund request. I have to respect them for that and others should take this into account in possible dealings them. They seem fair in the end, but their licensing terms./behavior has issues (objectively speaking).

I did wish them good luck and offered some licensing suggestions (some models to look into).

Now back to looking at the other top 3 ram disks and reading more of this good thread, again!


----------



## hhuey5

do these ramdisk work with SSD?

isn't there a risk if the computer freezes up you losted everything in the ramdisk?


----------



## Mike The Owl

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *hhuey5*
> 
> do these ramdisk work with SSD?
> 
> isn't there a risk if the computer freezes up you losted everything in the ramdisk?


Yes it works with SSDs as its all held in memory not on your dish, a good Ramdisk backs itself up so when your system crashes it reloads itself.


----------



## Magusrex

Broken Storm if you are out there can you give some wisdom on windows 10 OS and the use of RAM disks as win 10 uses memory differently than in earlier OS's? I've a new Samsung 850 EVO That utilizes the new vertical NAND technology.


----------



## derei

Hy there,

I read with a lot of interest all (yeah 15) pages of this topic in a quest to find the best ramdisk software for me. Despite the fact that after reading this i tried some of them, I still couldn't reach a conclusion.
And here is where I would really appreciate your help. Maybe i can get a good advice based on your years of tests and topic going on.

So, what I basically need is to know which ramdisk software is:

1. makes DIFFERENTIAL backup, so I don't need to save WHOLE image every time, but only what has changed. Even if 4-8GB doesn't take an hour now with the SSD drives, it still takes long
2. loads image automatically at startup and saves automatically at shut down
3. I DON'T need incremental backup because I will run it on my laptop and there a very little risk of power loss
4. Is free or decent cheap
5. Runs on Windows7 x64

Currently I run DATARAM Ramdisk but I believe it saves full image, not only differential.

I apologize if i stumbled into this like that and apparently have requests, please don't feel offended by this. I just tried to be as clear as possible, in the hope to get a equally clear answer. After all, seeing such work in testing countless ramdisk software, gave me some trust that i will get a good recommendation,

Thank you very much.


----------



## NIK1

Today I used msi command center to create a ram disk for ie cache and temp files. After reboot I have noticed when double clicking some program icons to start the program I get a error pop up in windows 10 x64 saying invalid picture. The program will not open. I uninstalled ram disk and this time only picked ie cache when installing the ram disk and rebooted and now my program icons start as normal. Anyone have any ideas why the ram disk with windows temp files selected caused invalid picture or how to fix it.Any ideas appreciated...


----------

