RAM drives are insanely fast, but are they a worthwhile project? lynda.com message: Sign up for your 10-day FREE trial at lynda.com/techquickie Follow: / linustech Join the community: linustechtips.com
Help! I just downloaded more ram off the Pirates Bay and it is not speeding up my computer. Should I also download a new broadband/PCI-E slot? I k ow they are virtually the same thing but I will buy both if needed.
Lol guys calm down it's a joke... and besides that memory is needed for the CPU to function... I'm not sure you could take space from the L3 cache without bricking the computer.... but if u want Linus you could give us a cool video
well the new(ish) E5 2699 currently has 55MB of L3 cache if i'm not wrong. I'm sure that somebody could find a use for that storage. Of course, it'd mean limiting your cache somewhat, slowing down other processes. It'd be interesting to see how it'd work though.
IIRC, the bigger your cache becomes, the more latency and power consumption, which is why cache (which has to be very fast, and is split up into different levels, each concurrent one having more space but higher latency) is pretty small. I think HBM on die with a cpu is what a lot of people are talking about as the way to go in the future.
Linux has this function built in. You can easily create a ramfs with the mount command: mount -t tmpfs -o size=512m tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk Most Linux Distros that run off live CD/USB can be told to load the entire OS to RAM at startup. In most cases if you are running a live system everything is going to be erased on reboot unless you tell it otherwise. So if you have enough RAM (and most full desktop Linux system are probably around 1.5GB, but many are much lighter), the only draw back is that it will take a few minutes for everything to copy to RAM while booting. Also, many Linux devices such as routers, modems, and IOT devices create and load the system to a RAM drive with a small partition on flash for storing settings.
That leaves me with a dilemma: If I want to store pfsense on a RAM drive, and it requires 8GB of storage and 1GB of ram, I may be unable to fit everything into an 8GB system.
The video was published on 2016, gentleman. And you are commenting a year later on RAM prices saying it's photoshopped. Now it's 2019. Time for us to move our asses keep going with the insane RAM prices...
Btw, your operating system already stores frequently used files (like some browser files, or files you r/w to frequently) on unused ram, so don't fill up your ram too much.
I have 12GB RAM but use a 3.5GB RAM disk not for speed, but to stop continuous writes to my SSD. My main use for this is NVIDIA Shadowplay: a 7.5 minute recording at 1080p 60 FPS in high quality takes up about 3GB in temporary files (which are automatically deleted when you save the recording) but is always recording in "Shadow" mode. Another use is for saving downloads and then running the installers/apps from there; since it'll be faster too and you'll get rid of them anyway.
Ssds are much more durable than you think and writing data to it like that won't wear it out. It will still last decades with shadow play running constantly
IDK about "decades" I remember when CDs were supposed to last 100 years. Well I have ones from the 1990s that look perfect and refuse to play. OTOH, I have 78rpm records from 1930 that play flawlessly...
pop pop not really, it's easy to set up and mostl ikely if you have a sudden power loss then you've lost the value of what's on the RAM drive anyway (e.g. files used during real-time gameplay capture, which are automatically deleted when you stop recording)
I remember playing around with RAM drives back in the eighties, you could purchase the card and install your own ram with a nice little battery backup if you wanted, and I had the operating system copy over on startup. Mind you, operating systems were a lot smaller back then so it only took about five minutes. Nowadays it almost takes that long just for the opening sequences to load up these days.
I don't really have any uses for it that wouldn't require I get more RAM. I have enough excess of RAM (32GB) to justify setting aside a few GBs for temporary downloads, but I'd need more for most applications I can think of. I suppose I could use it as a scratch for video if I really wanted, but that seems really risky.
I'm using it as a Temp drive right now, I used it for so long that i'm not sure if i want to store my temp files in a hdd now, aha. I'm also using it to quicky start up programs i use everyday such as Steam, SpeedFan, MSI Afterburner e.g Super helpful.
I've always heard it ram disk not ram drive. Tomato tomato I suppose. Except that when you write tomato tomato the words look identical so it doesn't really get the point across. Just go back and read the 2nd tomatoes with the British pronunciation.
I never actually use the app, desktop user here. Opened the app on my LG G3, and you guys are right, this is atrocious. They screwed up the comments on the desktop website too, when you reply to a comment there's no way to tell who you're talking to specifically.
“If your cat chews on your power cord” Things that are wrong with that 1. The cat gets shocked 2. The power cord is plugged into the ups so it still turns off Linus pls don’t kill me I’m a huge fan
The SSD can't control your RAM, but they do have an internal cache that might be faster than the storage flash or you may install software on your system to do that, but yes, I beleive recent versions of windows do something similar to what linux does. I think it generally works out as a better use than an actual ram disk as you get decent speed improvement but less volatility. You just need to make sure your disks sync before you detatch them I'm not sure on the windows front, but linux will inform software that, if it can fit a disk write into free memory, that the write happened almost instantaneously whilst it stores the data in RAM until the actual write is completed. If something looks for that data before the write finishes, it gets grabbed straight from RAM. Linux will also try and figure out which chunks of data get accesses most frequently from disk and try and stick them in RAM too.
There's a feature in Win10 for compressed memory that does it somewhat but the main feature called superfetch got depreciated because people figured SSDs were fast enough (this was used for HDDs). I think you can still enable it with a registry hack.
2:39 When you see a 16 GB kit of DDR4 3000 RAM going for $67 a little over 1 year ago, doesn't it make you mad that you can't even get a 8GB kit of budget DDR4 RAM for that price?
I absolutely cannot believe how much DDR4 has been. I recently paid nearly $200 for a decent 2x8GB set. Even black friday/cyber monday deals were about double what prices used to be. To answer your question; YES.
@@skandy6847 Nah, crypto doesn't affect RAM. It was "just" a RAM cartel deliberately manufacturing less than what was demanded so as to deliberately inflate prices.
It might be good to mention that your ram speed is only as fast as the lowest speed chip you have installed. So unless you have spare ram that matches your best installed ram, just sticking any old sticks in may not be a good idea as it could limit your performance.
I'm (to this day) using a Rochester QuadraJet CARB on an old IBM-PC AT 286-16 - 650 CFM, Tops, But that was the styyyyle in '89....and we LIKED IT..ok, Modern fuel injection MAY be more efficient, But Can't top the torque of a 286!
Installed COD4 onto a RAM drive a while back. The load times were quite a bit faster than normal, but I do not think it is very practical in most consumer settings.
If you have spare RAM, you can toy with two free programs. SoftPerfect RAM Disk and Steam Mover. Create a RAM disk, then move a Steam game onto it. Genereally, yeah, you'll see a bit of a loading boost, but not a lot. Realistically, only maybe 10% of a game's loading time is spent transferring data from one place to another. Most of what's done during loading times is processing on that data, decompression, rendering, etc.
Unfortunately, this is about as fast as it gets. If you want to go even faster, you need multiple faster interfaces that can be accessed in parallel and then RAID 0 them. I'm not sure if this is as doable on Windows as on Linux, but it's certainly possible. You will have a bigger latency than with RAM though, since RAM is as latency-free as it gets, until we start talking CPU cache.
Just to humor the point since I asked my CS professor, at that point, CPU Cache is fast only because it is small (less to search/sort through) and integrated into the processor for the most efficient data transfer. Here's an article on it: www.quora.com/Why-are-CPU-caches-faster-than-RAM
In linux it's a built in feature: ram is mounted on /tmp :). Also you can run it (the OS) from ram, (though you will still obviously have to boot from a persistant storage medium).
Not possible since L1 is closest to the compute node. You could do an L4 cache using a software RAM drive, an actual RAM drive like the Gigabyte GC-iRAM or Optane/Xpoint, which is an intermediate between RAM and Storage.
Friend had a pretty read/ write heavy Minecraft modpack running on a server so a few of us could play it together. Client side it ran fine from a standard disk drive but the server was always hitting the max IOPS of the disk drives and causing too much lag. Solution was to move the Minecraft server directory and modpack to a RAM drive. Set the drive up to save the contents of the RAM drive to an image file on a HDD every 10 minutes. Server lag went away. Only downside was the CPU got more of a workout due to the higher IOPS to the RAM. Either way it worked out fine with a 6 core Intel CPU and 12 GB RAM in 3 channel config. What does this mean? RAM drives can be useful in certain situations. OF course a good alternative would a pair of NVME drives running in RAID 0 but that's fairly expensive and not all systems support RAID on PCI E based drives spanning multiple slots.
I have been using ram drives for a very long time, it's simple in Linux, just add these to your /etc/fstab: tmpfs /tmp tmpfs nosuid,nodev,size=4G 0 0 tmpfs /ramdisk tmpfs nosuid,nodev,size=6G 0 0 tmpfs /cache tmpfs nosuid,nodev,size=2G 0 0 And create the /ramdisk/ and /cache/ directories. You are good to go. 4:40: What if the cat chews the main computer cord and not the UPS cord? Same thing right?
1tb ram now this makes sense just wish the program could save memory lane of data onto the normal disk so we can actually repeat all the actions if it crashes
wow i literally just commented on the puget system build video yesterday about making a ramdisk video. im not sure if this was in response to that or just really good timing but thank you regardless
there is a new type of memory being develop, called MRAM which can be use as a Ram but the catch is it non-volatile. Speed is slightly slower but still drastically faster than Ssd. I work in this project do I knew about. using Spin Orbit Torque as a mechanism for writing bit in Mram. the problem is still price.
I'm considering purchasing an ethernet switch for LAN parties. Could you do a video on what to consider when perusing the market for these guys? There are a lot of different versions of models that have different features I'm not really sure I need.
ImDisk. Use it for audio editting huge flac files. Awesomely fast. And if you have a laptop, this makes even more sense as a power outage won't be an issue with a battery assist (at least so you can shutdown and flush to the HD). Furthermore, "some versions" of windows have an Enhanced Write Filter, which basically does all of this better, and native without downloading any shit (but you better have a LOT of RAM). Also doubles as a virus filter if something goes terribly and you reboot very infrequently.
I am actually surprised that there are not PCIe expansion cards that have some low profile RAM slots on them that the user can populate, along with a battery, for use as a RAM drive. That would be pretty great. I know he mentioned that they exist in the video, but I don't see why there are not more affordable versions.
I've been looking into various RAMDisk software and I've noticed the results are quite variable. Some faster than others in pure speed, and some have better implementations (such as saving only changes to drive vs. the entire image) ... to my surprise, the fastest one I've tested so far is ASUS' ROG RAMDisk -- but I really dislike its interface. I suggest anyone serious about this topic should do a bit of research before settling for say, SoftPerfect's free version.
