n00b RAMDisk Question

[GheP]

Hello,

My first thread here, so here goes...

I have a WD Caviar 160GB 7200 HDD SATA. I see that RAMDisk can help performance by using some of the hard drive space as RAM. Now, here's my question -- is RAMDisk meant for only SSD drives or will it boost my performance with use on a 7200 spinner through SATA?

 

[GheP]

Lol I've activated my 3 gigs of RAMDisk through Ready Boost -- will this do anything for me or am I just being asinine?

*edit: i actually disabled this now -- it was making my HDD go berzerk.

 

[whs]

I don't think there is much to be gained. Superfetch is your best bet. It kind of acts like a RAM Disk. For more info, see here.

 

[GheP]

Thank you for that link whs!

I currently have Superfetch enabled on my Windows 7 computer (isn't is on by default anyways?)

I have setup my RAMdisk to hold my firefox and explorer temp cache along with my temp files, but does anyone know how to setup RAMdisk to contain my Google Chrome temp cache? I use Chrome as my main browser!

 

[Krispy1]

it will help a little but u already have 4gb of real ram so not really gonna do much

 

[Mellon Head]

I agree with Krispy1. Making a RAM disk on your system would show marginal improvements at best. You're running 4 gigs with a clock of over 3 GHz. You really aren't going to notice it.

Besides, allocating RAM away from Superfetch will ultimately slow down applications over all, rather than getting the performance increase that you're looking for.

 

[zigzag3143]

Hello,

My first thread here, so here goes...

I have a WD Caviar 160GB 7200 HDD SATA. I see that RAMDisk can help performance by using some of the hard drive space as RAM. Now, here's my question -- is RAMDisk meant for only SSD drives or will it boost my performance with use on a 7200 spinner through SATA?

SSD's. It will not show any improvement on a regular HD. Besides ram is always faster than HD.

 

[polarbear]

Agree... and also, you paid for the memory so you might as well use it... GL

 

[zzz2496]

Err..FYI: RAM disk = using RAM as a "disk", using disk as "RAM" is called "Virtual Memory" a.k.a Page File in Windows world. Assigning more PF to Windows might help you run programs that needs large memory requirement, but it can only do so much. HDD is the slowest storage system in our modern computer, so avoid using HDD as any kind of "RAM", it'll slow you down considerably. SuperFetch is a bit better than using HDD, it's got a great random access performance, but bad on throughput rate... The best solution is, put a lot of RAM in the machine...

zzz2496

 

[GheP]

Thanks for the advice and clarification all!

Yes, after tinkering with RAMdisk I noticed my computer was running slower than it was without. So I uninstalled it and will not be using it!

Thanks zzz2496, I was confusing this with VM.

 

[zzz2496]

You're welcome...

zzz2496