XFast Ram set up on Extreme 9

[rockinrondogg]

Hello all,

I have a question on setting up XFast Ram on the Extreme 9. My set up:

-x79 Extreme 9 Mobo
-64 GB 1866 Corsair Vengeance
-Win 7 X64

I've been building my own PC's for over 10 years but am new to Ramdisks. I set up a 8 GB Ramdisk (which I read somewhere is the highest XFastRam supports on Win 7x64). Now my question is can I install programs on the Ramdisk and run them from there. I have a couple video editing and audio programs that I use. Or can a ramdisk only be used to store files and not install programs. I installed FL Studio on the ramdisk and when I rebooted several files were gone and I wasn't able to run the program. Thanks.

[parsec]

A RAM Disk uses your PCs memory in a similar way as a regular HDD/SSD. It becomes a storage "volume" like any other, and is assigned a disk letter just like your other drives. So why don't we all use these instead of HDDs and SSDs? For the very reason you saw, RAM memory is not persistent, as soon as power is removed from it, everything on it is lost.

Since a reboot, or even a Windows Restart clears the RAM memory (due to power loss or the standard memory clearing on restart), anything in it will be lost. The RAM Disk will be recreated on each reboot (if configured that way), so anything put there previously will be gone. You may have temporary files or program caches set up on the RAM Disk, but they are just recreated more or less when the RAM Disk is created. So it may appear that some things are still on the RAM Disk, and others are not, but the temporary and cache files have just been created again. That is the major downside of RAM Disks.

Installing programs on a RAM Disk then adds registry settings, file paths and folders, etc, to the limitations of a RAM Disk. The installed files on the RAM Disk are gone after a reboot, but the registry entries, etc, still exist in the OS. That's a mess of course, but reinstall the program on the RAM Disk, and what happens? I'm sure you see what I mean. There may be ways that advanced RAM Disk software deals with all of this, but I don't think that is available on XFast RAM, but I could be missing it.

EDIT: I forgot about the Backup option on the XFast configuration screen, did you try that?

You can experiment with Windows Sleep, and see if everything is preserved on the RAM Disk when the PC wakes. Sleep uses RAM memory to restore the PC to its last state, so is supplied power. I'm not sure what a RAM Disks reaction to Sleep will be, a good question really, I would think it would be preserved, but who knows? I've used RAM Disks on my ASR board, but never really checked that closely.

[Tanquen]

FYI, look for the latest version of the XFast Ram program. The latest may not be shown on the Extreme 9 page on their site but when I first got my board with 64GB it would not let me setup a larger RAM disk. I emailed them and they sent me a newer version and I was then able to set up a 50 something GB RAM disk. I wanted to go to like 60GB but it would not let me. I use it to transcode video files. It gives a nice speed boost less the read writes to the SSD.

Even though the read/write speed to the RAM disk is around 5000 to 6000 MBs games and other programs did not see any real speed increase. I think there are too many other wait states or bottlenecks.

Unfortunately SSDs and RAM disks just don’t do much for day to day computing. You have to be doing something fairly specific. There great if you like to start Excel, Word and 10 or 15 web pages all at the same time but not much else. :(

[parsec]

What did you expect a RAM Disk to do for games and programs? A running program has been loaded into RAM memory, so unless you can configure the program to use the RAM Disk for its temp files that would otherwise be on disk, what can the RAM Disk do? The same goes for games, and if you can't put data files used by the game on the RAM Disk, it's not using it.

You can configure a RAM Disk to hold the system and user Windows temp files, and browser cache. Besides the CPU cache, PC RAM memory is the fastest storage device in a PC. If software and games could be configured to use a RAM Disk, they could be faster, but the issue of needing to recreate a RAM Disk on every boot reduces their usefulness.