Ramdisks - anyone using them for Games??

[s1xty7]

I give 8 of my 16GB over to a RAMDISK and it's full of pagefile. Not to save writes on my SSD, but to save some space on it. Even when you're careful, it's easy to fill up an Intel 80GB drive.

I REALLY hate to revive a dead thread, but I was browsing through this looking for info on RAM disks and saw this post. I had to speak up so others don't make this mistake. A pagefile is essentially a disk file for overflow of the data in RAM. Putting a pagefile on a RAM disk is costly, CPU cycle wise, and would cause a call to memory (due to lack of available RAM) to be written back into memory in the form of a RAM drive. If you have 16GB of RAM and a SSD, you would likely be best served by turning off the pagefile entirely and leaving the RAM available at 16GB.

Sorry again for bringing this up but I didn't want any random reader to follow in these footsteps. Not demeaning pauleden here, but you can get faster performance without this (although, as with all things RAM based, the observable differences may be small).

[scaryjim]

Does anyone have and use more than 8GB on a Windows 7 machine?

I have only once seen physical memory usage over 8GB on Windows 7, and I've related the story here previously - but on the principle that not everyone will remember: I was called into the office by one of the centre managers in the previous research unit I worked for. He'd just got a new machine and was trying out various activities on it that had been slow on his previous machine. He'd just done one with Task Manager opened and wanted to show me what happened when he sorted a large data file in SPSS.

Now, to be fair this is a file with > 1,000,000 records - we are talking very big datasets here - but I was amazed to watch the memory usage rocket upward to a peak of around 13.5GB of physical memory usage, dropping immediately the sort was completed. It certainly explained why the old machines (Some of which had as little as 2GB RAM) were so slow for some of the scripts we ran on them...

[kalniel]

If you have 16GB of RAM and a SSD, you would likely be best served by turning off the pagefile entirely and leaving the RAM available at 16GB.

Well no, you're best served by having a pagefile on the SSD and leaving the RAM alone. I agree with you that putting the pagefile on a RAM disk is particularly self-defeating however

[pauleden]

I REALLY hate to revive a dead thread, but I was browsing through this looking for info on RAM disks and saw this post. I had to speak up so others don't make this mistake. A pagefile is essentially a disk file for overflow of the data in RAM. Putting a pagefile on a RAM disk is costly, CPU cycle wise, and would cause a call to memory (due to lack of available RAM) to be written back into memory in the form of a RAM drive. If you have 16GB of RAM and a SSD, you would likely be best served by turning off the pagefile entirely and leaving the RAM available at 16GB.

Sorry again for bringing this up but I didn't want any random reader to follow in these footsteps. Not demeaning pauleden here, but you can get faster performance without this (although, as with all things RAM based, the observable differences may be small).

It's OK, it's not demeaning, because you're wrong. You should always have a pagefile. Where it goes isn't really relevant. The couple of CPU cycles caused by reading or writing to RAM instead of a drive is negligable, especially with modern multi core processors.

By way of an update, I don't actually do this any more anyway. Not because putting pagefile in memory is a bad idea, but because the SSD in question was quite small. It's since been replaced by a much bigger one and I can easily fit the pagefile and everything else onto the SSD.

[Oswald]

I used to have a Ramdisk, but gave up on it. I also put my temp files on it and at times I had trouble downloading stuff from the internet because the R disc was too small. And at some point I wanted to remove it, but something went wrong and it didn't remove the disc, only the Ramdisk program. After that I kept getting a lot of errors. I had to reformat my computer, so now I'm not going back that way.