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Looking for a free Ramdisk program that someone here has used before.

Started by Foodlion, November 05, 2013, 01:32:51 PM

Foodlion

I'm tired of slow Sony Vegas Pro 11, and want to try Ramdisking it so I can get it rolling in more real time (Not for the rendering which I know is based on the CPU, but general importing, editing my tracks). The ram stick I'm looking to use a Corsair 4Gig Ram drive (Corsair Vengeance 4GB DDR3 1600MHz).
I know I should really try this with 8g, but I'm not going to buy a single slot 8G ram with out at least trying this out first.
If anyone can help, then many thanks. If not, I'll eventually find out from someone somewhere.

area51drone

Man, Ramdisks are great.   I used to use them all the time back in the dos days.  I have no idea what utilities one would use now a days.  I feel like I've done it in the last number of years out of necessity,  but it was probably just a dos ram disk from a floppy boot utility.    I know this doesn't answer the question, but why not just buy an SSD?   I picked up a 120 gig SSD for about $70 I think, I use it as my xp swap drive, and for other crap that I don't care about but want speed for.


Foodlion

Quote from: area51drone on November 05, 2013, 09:54:24 PM
Man, Ramdisks are great.   I used to use them all the time back in the dos days.  I have no idea what utilities one would use now a days.  I feel like I've done it in the last number of years out of necessity,  but it was probably just a dos ram disk from a floppy boot utility.    I know this doesn't answer the question, but why not just buy an SSD?   I picked up a 120 gig SSD for about $70 I think, I use it as my xp swap drive, and for other crap that I don't care about but want speed for.
I myself never did use ramdisking back in the dos era, but my brother did, and spoke nearly the same words as you. Those were the days when your PC upgrade was ram, and only ram was needed.
I believe I have the scrap components to make a SSD out of an old 2.5" hard drive that I used as my backup (I believe this would just need a SATA connection cable) but I guess I'll find out soon enough. All day yesterday I considered doing this. I just may end up doing a SSD since my ramdisking has really not gone far.
Thanks Bubbles!


area51drone

Well a ram disk would be nice though, so if someone has a good answer for this, I'm ears too.   After your post, I read a bit about them and found someone who posted a utility that would make a 32mb drive, but obviously that's pretty small.   But they made a great point that it could be used to load network cache / temp files and they'd be wiped every reboot.  I think even 32mb is small for that, but I'd definitely sport a 512mb drive or larger for various purposes.

If I had a little more time, I'd look harder, but I'm busy with so many other things right now.   I think the fact that Windows allocates you something like a virtual 2gb per process and then swaps to disk supposedly only when it needs to might be part of the reason that you don't see ram disks anymore.

Morgus

I tried a free ramdisk program a few years back that worked with Windows XP, but I don't believe that one worked with Windows 7.

I did however find this newer ramdisk program that does work with Windows 7 and 8:
http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

Dataram RAMDisk - Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista, XP, Server
Intel or AMD-based system with at least 512MB RAM. Dataram RAMDisk is compatible with all versions of Windows 8, Windows 7, Windows Vista (x86 and x64), Windows XP (x86 and x64), all editions of Windows Server 2003 (x86 and x64), all editions of Windows server 2008 (x86 and x64). Dataram RAMDisk is freeware for personal use (up to 4 GB disk size). Disks larger than 4 GB require registration and a license which can be purchased for $18.99 USD. Registration and license are not required for disks under 4 GB.

The free version works with a ramdisk up to 4GB, so that would be good to test with.

Foodlion

Thanks for the info fellas. I'm in the process of testing a Ramdisk via RAMdisk and softperfect, AND SSD that I'm ordering the parts for. I don't want to spent more money 
I'll see how it works out.

area51drone

Let us all know what you think of the ramdisk stuff, if it's good I'll give it a go.   I'm just about to start some work that I think it would be useful to have a ramdisk for, so I'm curious to see how it works for you.   Probably most interested in knowing about it's stability.   I have so much crap on my machine that things like adding even a USB drive might throw me into crash land, and as it is my work machine, it's tough to risk.

Foodlion

Quote from: area51drone on November 07, 2013, 02:24:56 PM
Let us all know what you think of the ramdisk stuff, if it's good I'll give it a go.   I'm just about to start some work that I think it would be useful to have a ramdisk for, so I'm curious to see how it works for you.   Probably most interested in knowing about it's stability.   I have so much crap on my machine that things like adding even a USB drive might throw me into crash land, and as it is my work machine, it's tough to risk.
Sure thing. Amazon free delivery is slower than anything, but the 4gb stick will get here before long.
My understanding if you don't have a lot of ram to begin with, and in my case 5gigs total as of now, then it's really pointless. Good thing is, I'm doing a decent PC upgrade altogether which will include
Graphics card from 256mb Radeon HD4200 (What a joke) to MSI NVIDIA GeForce GT 610 2GB GDDR3
Standard Power Supply 300w to Corsair 430 Builder Series
No Firewire ports to 3 Port Firewire PCI-E
5gb ram to 9gb ram (Likely to up that even more soon)
And of course to make the stock tower look geeklike, I ordered in some 80mm fans with leds of course lol.
The PC is stock with 2xAMD225 Processors I think running at 3.1Ghz.
No need to upgrade my motherboard until I'm out of PCI-e slots, and I'll have 2 more for Sound card and Wifi upgrades if I decide.
I can't complain a single bit about this PC, it was free, it's still decent, and My laptop hard drive pooped on me, and it was on it's way out the door before that.
So this is going to be my new machine for the time being. I'm Mcloving it thus far.

area51drone

I'm building a new box for my Dad who is obsessed with COD Ghost.  Just found this video on Newegg about Ramdisk

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820403006

gustne

I've tried at least 5 free ramdrive apps with no noticeable improvement but found that Windows ReadyBoost with a usb stick DID make a noticeable improvement. 

Next purchase will be a Samsung 1tb SSD, transferable downstream to a new PC of course...  (Why buy more ram for a 7 year old PC...)

steelbot

Well thought I might chime in..

Here is my build, parts are definitely cheaper now.

Motherboard   - ASUS P8Z68-Deluxe
Ram      - Corsair Vengeance Blue 16gb DDR-3
Case       - Corsair Special Edition White 600T
CPU       - Intel Core i7 2600K
CPU-Cooling   - Corsair H80 Water Cooling option
CPU-Cooling   - Replaced H80 Stock 120mm Fans with Deep Cool UF120’s (x2)
PowerSupply   - Corsair Pro Series Gold 750watt
Graphics   x 2 (Although One works perfectly)- Sapphire Dirt 3 Edition â€" AMD 6950
Hard-Disk   - Intel 320 Series SSD 120 GBytes
2 x 1Tb internal 2.5 Seagate GoFlex drives

This was my build back in December 2011.

Additional Components already had or purchased after build.

5 TBytes of 2.5inch portable Seagate GoFlex drives installed into the system.  I cracked them open from the case they were in initially, and RAID configured 2 of them.

LG Blu-Ray burner, already had previously in older system.
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 â€" Previously purchased.
Monitor is 40 inch LED-LCD 1080p Samsung purchased in Oct. 2010.  (Plan on doubling up Monitors later)
Keyboard/Mouse:
Older Logictech MX5500
Razor Star Wars The Old Republic Mouse
.

And that’s it, most of these components are older now and with the new Ivy Bridge stuff out, should be cheaper if stock is still able to be found.

**Grand Total of 13 TB now of storage.
Black Magic Intesity Pro HDMI Video Capture Card
Ihas DvD-R (xbox 360 burner)

I do a lot of video editing and rendering.  My other machine is a dual quad core xeon server with up to 48gb of ram =P and it has 1 7200 rpm drive, 2 10k raptor 320s raided.

For speeds increases I've tried the ramdisks as well, but found that the faster drives are better.  You will probably not see significant improvement in Linear Editing, unless you get an SSD.  Building your own, sounds fun, but they're pretty cheap now (relatively speaking).  I'd get a 250 or 500gb ssd.  I would also stick with Windows 7 Ultimate 64 if possible vs Win 8 for this type of work.  I use Adobe's Creative Suite and various other video encoders/editing software daily as my hobby.  If you have any other questions shoot - and yes my PC build is actually old by most of today's standards but it still rocks this stuff out like nobody's business! 

Quote from: steelbot on December 04, 2013, 11:05:22 AM

**Grand Total of 13 TB now of storage.
Black Magic Intesity Pro HDMI Video Capture Card
Ihas DvD-R (xbox 360 burner)

I do a lot of video editing and rendering.  My other machine is a dual quad core xeon server with up to 48gb of ram =P and it has 1 7200 rpm drive, 2 10k raptor 320s raided.
How are you backing this up? Or do you have critical data you back up and the rest is not worth the cost?

steelbot

Quote from: Mind Flayer Monk on December 04, 2013, 12:49:04 PM
How are you backing this up? Or do you have critical data you back up and the rest is not worth the cost?
only 3-5tb is backed up monthly and, the rest is pretty much spare working storage.  My backup procedures are antiquated in the respect to current gen software that may do it for you.  I have spare TB portable drives that I duplicate to.  This is my movies, music, and photos, project creation backup.  I make an immediate copy on DVD R or dual layer discs depending on pricing when I have a full 4 or 8 gigs to archive for that month.
 

 

area51drone

Jesus Christ Steelbot.. that is a hell of a machine.   I wish I had the time to enjoy such hardware!  I'm still running 32 bit windows, so no more than 4gb of ram for me.  LOL


area51drone

Quote from: wr250 on December 11, 2013, 06:53:40 PM
look into enabling PAE on your 32bit windows box ...

Nice, hadn't heard that one.  Thanks for the tip.   

wr250

processes wil still be limited to 4GB of ram per process, but if you are using that much ram, you need to find out why. PAE should allow you to use up to 64 GB ram. $micro$haft  limits it by os version .only windows 2008 enterprise and datacenter (not R2) allow 64GB... ,newer versions i believe (could be wrong) are only  64bit.

area51drone

Quote from: wr250 on December 15, 2013, 02:05:38 PM
processes wil still be limited to 4GB of ram per process, but if you are using that much ram, you need to find out why. PAE should allow you to use up to 64 GB ram. $micro$haft  limits it by os version .only windows 2008 enterprise and datacenter (not R2) allow 64GB... ,newer versions i believe (could be wrong) are only  64bit.

Yes I agree if you're using more than 4GB that program pretty much has to have a leak somewhere.   Perhaps some graphics or audio processing software could really stretch it but I'm sure they're written to pass safely under that limit.    It's definitely a good tip, and one I will explore once my busy time is over in a few weeks.

Is knoppix still around? That might work for you.

edit: sorry misread your application, you probably want something different.

wr250

yes knoppix is still around. might not be for him though. it is a live cd so people could try it without changing or even touching their current os.

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