How Do RAM Drives Work?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2017-05-06
·
1,146 words · ~5 min read
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300 600 2500 megabytes per second solid state
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drives or ssds are fantastic and have brought us super quick storage
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performance with lower power consumption and without the fragile moving parts of
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mechanical hard drives but what if you want to go even faster well the absolute
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fastest storage solution you can have in a desktop rig anyway is a RAM Drive
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which is just what it sounds like setting aside a certain amount of RAM to
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use as well a really really fast drive
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so why is RAM good for this then you see
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part of the reason we use RAM as the working memory for whatever the computer
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is doing at a given time instead of using a hard drive or even a regular SSD
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for that is because RAM is extremely
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fast this allows the computer to read and write the data that it needs to act
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upon without having to wait around and this Paradigm has existed since long
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before long-term Solid State Storage became mainstream in fact the first RAM
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Drive software came about all the way back in
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1980 so just how fast are we talking about then well depending on your
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configuration you can get sequential read and write speeds in the
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neighborhood of 7 to 10 gigabytes per
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second or more that's like downloading an entire dual layer Blu-ray in 5
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seconds and even if you're not working with massive sequential files like you'd
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see with uh audio editing or video and
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image rendering you can still get a big
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performance boost with programs that access small amounts of data very
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frequently I mean think about your web browser's cache for example because RAM
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drives have very low latency or access
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delay with very high iops the number of
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operations per second so how then do you set this up well
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there are a number of applications that you can find with a quick and easy
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Google search that will convert free memory into a RAM drive for you just
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tell it how big of a RAM Drive you'd like to make assign a drive letter and
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you are pretty much good to go after that Windows will recognize your RAM
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drive just like it would any other storage device connected to your system
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so you'll be free to copy files and install programs to it as you normally
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would but even though system memory is
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much cheaper these days there are other costs associated with storing anything
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resembling important data on a RAM Drive
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anyone who's ever suffered a power outage while they were doing something
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important on their PC has probably learned the hard way that RAM is what is
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called volatile that means that its contents disappear when you power off
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your system so some RAM Drive utilities
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will back up the contents of your RAM dis to a hard drive or SSD for you
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periodically but this will still mean long delays on shutdown while it purges
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and on boot while the RAM Drive fills so
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sorry if you were hoping to store your operating system on a RAM disk this
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pretty much koses that unless you're
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like a computer magician or you buy a super expensive hardware-based RAM disk
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solution with like battery backup which is very rare outside of an Enterprise
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setting and because of platform not to mention cost limitations RAM diss aren't
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great for storing tons of stuff either
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the most standard unbuffered memory that can fit on even the highest end consumer
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motherboards these days is 128 gbt and
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since your operating system and other applications will need some of that
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space as well the largest RAM dis you can comfortably make will be a little
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bit less than that but but don't let any
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of that discourage you if you've got some excess RAM sitting around and you'd
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like to see just how blisteringly fast you can make your storage experience
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this is a fun little science fair project and free there are free ones and
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can possibly even be useful for frequently used programs or applications
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that are otherwise bottlenecked by drive speed especially as you can increase
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read and write speeds even further by overclocking your CPU and RAM or by
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tightening up your memory timings however if you're putting
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anything resembling crucial data on a RAM Drive even save games okay anything
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that's going to waste your time invest in a ups for your rig as well because
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