48GB of RAM in a Desktop PC, that’s a server I here you say, other than virtualisation with VMware Player 5.0 or VMware Workstation 9.0, or Client Hyper-V in Windows 8.0, or Oracle Virtualbox 4.0, it does seem a bit extreme, even the latest games, or Adobe Photoshop, you will be hard pushed to utilise all the memory.
Those that are old enough, once upon a time, in year DOS! we used a driver called – ramdrive.sys, that you could load into system memory, and turn some system memory into a ramdrive. RAM was expensive years ago, and only a few kilobytes or megabytes could be used as a ramdrive, but system access was almost instantaneous.
about eight years ago, a company wrote a ramdrive driver for Windows 2000 for clients, to use as a Windows 2000 profile drive for the storage of user profiles for a large terminal server project, to speed up the logon and logoff of users. I’ve been searching for an updated version since, that works with the modern Windows OS, now I’ve found one.
Now with the cost of memory for desktop PCs falling, the following company DR Dataram have produced a new RAMDisk for modern operating systems, and it’s FREE, and allows you to create RAMDisks up to 4GB, if you want to create RAMDisks larger than 4GB, you will need to part with 18.99 USD! It supports Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012.
Install the software, specify the size
Specify Load, Save and Autosave options
and Hey Presto! you’ve got a ramdrive, out of system memory, and the magic of a ramdrive compared to an SSD, checkout the following benchmarks!
Performance of DR Dataram RAMDisk versus 4 x SATA 3 Kingston 200v+ SSDs in RAID 10
Comparison SSD versus RAMDisk
and for the geeks in the audience, that like IOPS
Comparison of IOPS
Comparison of IOPS - the numbers!
So, this Christmas if you want a fast data disk for your OS, spend your money on RAM for your computer, and bin that SSD (they wear out anyway!)
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