Boost up performance of your PC/Server by using Ramdisk-Virtual disk
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Do you have following situations regarding the performance of your PC or Server either running Windows or Linux:
- Speed up the performance of swap space for Virtual memory ( page file )
-
Create Log files of highly transitional databases MS-SQL-Server , MySQL or Oracle on quickest/fastest accessible physical media ( as fast as RAM ) for extreme performance
- Record high definition quality audio and video ( high rate) on a media other than SCSI or SAS but even faster.
- Keep your internet explorer, Firefox or chrome temporary files on fastest available media for fast browsing
- Move the TCP/IP stack and log of your OS to fastest accessible media for extreme performance on busy Web servers, file servers and software network routers
- Want to achieve fastest compressing and uncompressing of large files on fastest media, Either on dedicated or on demand compression servers.
- Boost up the encryption and decryption process of files, archives and other secure information quickly and securely, and don’t want to keep any trace on physical hard drive ( highly volatile memory).
- Serve cached web content and media from web servers at amazing blazing speed
- Boost up the speed of Adobe Photoshop, Corel Draw and photo and other demanding graphics suite applications which require their own scratch and swap space, by maintaining on fastest accessible media for quickest rendering.
- Increase the speed of 3D rendering in rendering software like 3D max / Maya etc.
- Keep available your print server at high demand and load by placing the printer spooler folder on fastest media
- Boost the performance of Windows 7 and Windows Vista by keeping “ReadyBoost” cache folder on volatile fast memory
- Boost up performance and reduce load time of games by keeping temp sand game save folders on fast access physical media.
- Maintain privacy and security of highly sensitive information in certain special applications. For such services or applications, this is an important attribute that contributes to the protection of sensitive data or information.
If any of the above situation applies to you then what you need is a RAM DISK. Ram disk is a virtual drive created in RAM and mapped in Operating system. These virtual drives behave and act like a physical hard drive, except are exceptionally fast ( as fast as RAM ) in retrieving and storing data, in fact these are faster than a Hard disk drive can ever be, since it has no moving parts – no head, no spindle no RPMs involved.
There is a catch, however, RAM Disk is volatile storage, meaning data on it is lost the moment you lose power, or reboot the computer. Another issue is that RAM Disks also take away from your system’s available RAM. Your PC or server must have lot of RAM available because once you reserve a portion of the RAM for Ram disk, it is no longer available for your running programs. There is however, a feature available in Ramdisks which is auto-save feature, which can save the contents of RAM disk to physical drive whenever the system is going to restart of shutdown, this feature can be enabled or disabled as per requirement.
There are many free and paid Ramdisk solution for both home users and enterprises, the solution varies depending on the features, disk size limitation and management options.
- RamDisk Plus from SuperSpeed ( 32 and 64 bit support available )
- VRAMDIR
- Free Ramdisk Driver
- Free Microsoft Sample Driver Microsoft KB 257405
- Free Ramdisk for Win Vista, XP, windows 2003 and 2000 Server
- QSoft Ramdisk for Win7, vista, XP and 2003, 2000 server. Free edition available as well.
- Yet another Free Ramdisk for windows
- DataArm ramdisk ( free )
- VSuite Ramdisk from Romex Software ( free edition available too )
- Ramdisk creation in linux – how to guide
- Ramdisk from Everstrike software
So far I’ve talked about software RAM disks above, but there are hardware RAM disks available as well by different vendors, these are in particular important for extremely fast and demanding processing servers where it makes sense to go for hardware based solution. For example, Gigabyte’s i-RAM is custom intelligent controller, i-RAM acts like a regular SATA hard drive at theoretically 1.5Gb/s data transfer rate. By utilizing conventional DDR memory modules, i-RAM is outfitted with four 184-pin DIMM slots that will accept any DDR DIMM and support up to 4GB unbuffered / non-ECC memory. Checkout the benchmarking results of this incredibly fast drive here. Fusion IO has some fantastic products which might suite your extreme computing requirements.
Other options in this area are Flash based SSD cards and solid state drives which are way faster than normal hard drives, the advantage with Flash based SSD cards and solid state drives is that these are not volatile memories and data can persist even if power is off, however their performance is inferior to than of the software/hardware RAM disks. Gizmodo has an extensive listing of solid state drives and reviews.
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