WOW - 1783 MB/sec via RAMDISK

That's pretty slow, actually. i7s can get about 7000+ mb/s read/write in ramdisk -- due to triple channel. I use it myself for swapfiles for web browsing, makes it faster.
 
You don't really need any special thing aside from free memory to get such increases already. If you have 16GB RAM, and you read a 10GB file, that file will be in your RAM. If you read it again, it'll go at memory speeds without any overhead caused by a ramdisk driver.

In Linux and BSD you have the tmpfs filesystem, which shares memory with your free RAM and stores file in RAM instead. This makes its maximum size all the RAM you have available, without actually using/reserving that space. It also makes sure files only end up once in RAM; while with Windows+RAMdisk you would have files twice in RAM: one on the RAMdisk the other as RAM filecache; not really efficient.

Just having a lot of RAM and hoping the OS does a good job at caching your usual stuff might make more sense to me than a separate RAMdisk.
 
It makes sense sub.mesa. For swapfile I guess it's automatic. The OS takes care of everything. I guess it depends on how you use RamDisk, In my case I edit videos that
are 4GB in size so this maybe beneficial to me. There maybe other applications this may be useful.
 
sub.mesa said:
You don't really need any special thing aside from free memory to get such increases already. If you have 16GB RAM, and you read a 10GB file, that file will be in your RAM. If you read it again, it'll go at memory speeds without any overhead caused by a ramdisk driver.

In Linux and BSD you have the tmpfs filesystem, which shares memory with your free RAM and stores file in RAM instead. This makes its maximum size all the RAM you have available, without actually using/reserving that space. It also makes sure files only end up once in RAM; while with Windows+RAMdisk you would have files twice in RAM: one on the RAMdisk the other as RAM filecache; not really efficient.

Just having a lot of RAM and hoping the OS does a good job at caching your usual stuff might make more sense to me than a separate RAMdisk.
Click to expand...

Absolutely true!
I have a w2k8 r2 system with 64gb of ram. It regularly retains 10gb - 20gb files in memory.

In 32-bit Windows you could set a cap on the amount of ram used for file cache. But in 64-bit, you can't. As far as I can tell, any attempts to cap the file cache size are ignored by the OS.

W2k8 r2 does a much better job (than w2k8) at reclaiming/trimming ram from the file cache. I'd assume there is a similar difference between vista x64 and win7 x64.

P.S.
Sometimes on a move of a large file from one disk to another, the explorer gui will report the file move as complete. But it isn't really complete...
Resmon.exe will show that the file is still being writen to the target disk, for several minutes after the gui has reported it as complete.

While the inconsistency between the gui and "real life" seems rather dangerous to me, I've never tested it by pulling the plug out of the wall.
 
meltri said:
It makes sense sub.mesa. For swapfile I guess it's automatic. The OS takes care of everything. I guess it depends on how you use RamDisk, In my case I edit videos that
are 4GB in size so this maybe beneficial to me. There maybe other applications this may be useful.
Click to expand...

Where your editing program stores its undo/changes information is probably more important. If you have enough ram to store the original file in memory, it probably doesn't matter if the original file is on in the file cache or on a ram disk. It's just the original file. Once it's in memory, it's in memory (assuming it's a 64-bit editing program).

It's the storage of your undo/changes history that is important. If those are being stored in something like windows/temp (rather than ram), that is where your bottleneck will be.
 
@simplesam:

Next time you experience this file copy complete indication on your GUI in W2k8 R2, open the task manager and watch the RAM usage... You'll see how during the start of the copy or move, the RAM usage will go up and after it reports the copy as complete, the RAM usage will slowly decrease at the rate of the actual HDD write speed... ;)
 
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