RAMDisk slower than Spinning drive!?!
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I have a pretty much brand new system with 16GB DDR4 memory on which I have Win 7 32bit OS. I made a RAMDisk (using Dataram RAMDisk) of 8GB on which I keep windows paging file. I ran DiskBench tool and ran file creation with the following settings Create Two files Block Size - 256KB Number of blocks - 30 The above values replicate the writing that I usually do on this PC most of the time. Here are the results- RAMDisk - ~9MB/s Spinning drive - ~97MB/s SSD - ~441MB/s I am confused about the RAMDisk performance as I expect it to be the faster among the three by far. Any ideas? thanks
PKNT
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I have a pretty much brand new system with 16GB DDR4 memory on which I have Win 7 32bit OS. I made a RAMDisk (using Dataram RAMDisk) of 8GB on which I keep windows paging file. I ran DiskBench tool and ran file creation with the following settings Create Two files Block Size - 256KB Number of blocks - 30 The above values replicate the writing that I usually do on this PC most of the time. Here are the results- RAMDisk - ~9MB/s Spinning drive - ~97MB/s SSD - ~441MB/s I am confused about the RAMDisk performance as I expect it to be the faster among the three by far. Any ideas? thanks
PKNT
Even though you wrote that you keep paging file in the RAM disk, one question is, do you have enough available RAM for the RAMDisk? The performance would be catastrophic if the OS is paging anyway. Also I don't believe that it would make sense to use RAM for paging file. The purpose of the paging file is basically to provide additional space if RAM is exhausted. I believe it would be better to let the OS use it for file caching etc.
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Even though you wrote that you keep paging file in the RAM disk, one question is, do you have enough available RAM for the RAMDisk? The performance would be catastrophic if the OS is paging anyway. Also I don't believe that it would make sense to use RAM for paging file. The purpose of the paging file is basically to provide additional space if RAM is exhausted. I believe it would be better to let the OS use it for file caching etc.
Sorry if I am not clear, but I am using 32 bit OS, so you can access only about 3GB of RAM for OS. Since I already have 16GB of memory installed which is not being utilized, I made a 8GB RAMDisk using the unutilized RAM which I use for paging file.
PKNT
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I have a pretty much brand new system with 16GB DDR4 memory on which I have Win 7 32bit OS. I made a RAMDisk (using Dataram RAMDisk) of 8GB on which I keep windows paging file. I ran DiskBench tool and ran file creation with the following settings Create Two files Block Size - 256KB Number of blocks - 30 The above values replicate the writing that I usually do on this PC most of the time. Here are the results- RAMDisk - ~9MB/s Spinning drive - ~97MB/s SSD - ~441MB/s I am confused about the RAMDisk performance as I expect it to be the faster among the three by far. Any ideas? thanks
PKNT
Kiran Satish wrote:
I have a pretty much brand new system with 16GB DDR4 memory on which I have Win 7 32bit OS.
That almost equals my setup, but with DDR3 and a laptop CPU :)
Kiran Satish wrote:
I made a RAMDisk (using Dataram RAMDisk) of 8GB on which I keep windows paging file.
Ehr.. aight, we have a paging file because PC's have a limited amount of memory, and lots of harddisk space. The only reason to put something in "virtual memory" is because it is too expensive to put it in real memory (aka, hardware RAM). Putting the page-file on a RAM-disk defeats the purpose of having a page-file. I also have an SSD, and did not believe there should be a page-file with 16Gb worth o' memory. I have had recommendations here to do otherwise and am happy to have followed the advice.
Kiran Satish wrote:
Any ideas?
Having created my own ram-disk[^], I would say that performance is limited in a number of ways. One of those is the limitation of the speed of your memory; virtual memory is slower than blocks of data pinned into physical memory. Did that make my RAM-disk faster? No, it is limited by the driver itself, bottlenecking at 48 Mb/s, which is actually rather impressive. Works nice if the RAM-disk leaves at least 6 Gb of free working memory; it is fast in terms of access, making up for the lack in terms of transfer, and thus doing nice when manipulating lots of small files. Like compiling and building a project :)
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^][](X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett)