xfast ram running out of space issue

[rebelyell]

hello,

I just enabled xfast ram y: 4096mb . I also have 2 flash cards in for xfast usb 1 dedicated and 1 usable ready boost settings. hard drive is 500 gb hdd and gobbs of room. as soon as I started using it the y: xfast ram windows keeps saying im running out of room. what and why and how is this happening.. any help would be appreciated.

16gb ram asrock 970 pro3 4170fx cpu

thanks, rebelyell

[parsec]

Re: xfast ram running out of space issue

What is the RAM drive being used for? What is in it? If you check its Properties in Windows, how much free space is available?

Windows 7 is 64bit?

[rebelyell]

Re: xfast ram running out of space issue

hi parsec,

it has cache files and temp files in it. I have virtual memory pageing files turned on but I didn't see anything in there on that. I was looking around and saw that ready boost was turned on for that xfast ram drive y: and I had 35 mb free. so I turned off the ready boost and now I have almost 2gb free from the total 4gb. was that the problem??? also I noticed when I turned on xfast ram that my ram usage went from 13% at idle to 35% at idle, does that sound right...and why???

yes I have win 7ult 64bit

as I was looking around I used window to check y: for errors I dant know why I did but. now I cannot even change the size of he y: partition in axtu in wont let me to anything with it...

[rebelyell]

Re: xfast ram running out of space issue

I turned off xfast ram then truned it back on. now I can change the size of the partion . also set the ready boost 250mb.. now I have 1,73gb available space of the 4096mb of total space...another question I have is why does it automatically use 2gb of the total 4 gb right off the top...

[parsec]

Re: xfast ram running out of space issue

I've seen some of these things when I used XFast RAM in the past.

With the pagefile (and ready boost it seems) on the RAM drive, whatever size you have set for the pagefile is pre-allocated on the RAM drive. Meaning that space is set aside for pagefile use, even if it is never used by Windows. So say you set the pagefile to 1GB of space, then 1GB is set aside for the pagefile, and nothing else can use it. I checked my pagefile usage by Windows in (I think) Performance Monitor, and it was zero. But all that space on the RAM drive was sitting there doing nothing, and locked into pagefile usage.

You can change the size of the pagefile of course, but I realized something else about it...

The pagefile goes way back to at least XP AFAIK. What is it used for, what is its purpose? The pagefile is a replacement for system memory. In the XP days, many PCs only had 1GB or 2GB of RAM, certainly less than 4GB on many PCs, due to using a 32bit OS. So the pagefile became the storage a program used (via Windows) when it needed RAM memory but none was available. Consider how slow a HDD or SSD is compared to RAM, pagefile works but is slow slow slow.

Then I realized, since the pagefile is a replacement for RAM memory, and we're putting the pagefile in RAM memory... how does that make sense, what is the point? We are reducing the size of our RAM memory by putting the pagefile into RAM memory, and if the pagefile in RAM is actually used, what is the difference between that and just having RAM available for use in the first place?

Some people have said, "... some programs use the pagefile...". Why? If a program wants to use a temporary file, it can just create one, nothing stops it from doing that. Any good program would use RAM instead of a file on disk. IMO, most people with more that 4GB of RAM do not even need a pagefile. I have pagefile disabled on four PCs, with at least 8GB of RAM, and have never had a problem. Anyone would get much better performance by adding RAM instead of using the pagefile.

Cache and temp files (that would otherwise be files on disk) in a RAM drive makes perfect sense. The pagefile in a RAM drive makes no sense IMO.

Again, whatever space in the RAM drive you set for each purpose is automatically set aside so it will be guaranteed to be available. Otherwise it would not work right.