Do you have a plain old hard drive? 7200 RPM? Well, so do I. If anything, you might have more than 1 in RAID and they might perform like the cover image above.
Oh? You have something faster? You must have a Solid State Drive (SSD) speeding up your startup and shutdown times like this:
You can really see the difference between a regular hard drive and a solid stat drive! It’s about 3x faster! Wait until you see this:
Jealous yet? I bet you’re SSD can’t get this fast. I introduce you to my RAMDisk, using only 4096 MB of my 1866MHz RAM. The performance of this RAMDisk is 9x faster than an SSD and 27x faster than a typical hard drive. However, it comes at a steep cost: $5 per GB minimum. That’s even more expensive than SSDs going for about $1 per GB!
A RAMDisk creates physical memory for your computer to store information. With speeds this high, there are many tweaks you can perform without having to buying an SSD if you have RAM to spare. In this case, I used AMD RAMDisk (free software, creates up to 4GB RAMDisk).
But wait? RAM is volatile and everything you save in the RAMDisk will be erased after the power is cut! True, but with AMD RAMDisk, you can create an image of the RAMDisk to save automatically before shutdown, and load upon startup. It doesn’t take that long with 4GB, so its cool!
Here are some uses for RAMDisks if you have RAM to burn:
- Move your browser cache and temporary files to the RAMDisk – speeds up browsing, saves read/write cycles for SSDs
- In fact, just install FireFox / Chrome / Opera on the RAMDisk to speed up browsing all together!
- Install games for faster load times – Minecraft Servers are a big plus here
- Install rendering/rasterizing software – Photoshop, CAD, GIMP will be seriously fast
- Virtualization software – VMWare would be useful if you had more than 4GB to play with
If you already have an SSD, using a RAMDisk helps save some read/write cycles to let your SSD last longer. Using a RAMDisk is usualy great for people with older computers who refuse to upgrade (that’s right, you people running Windows XP with 2GB RAM and less).
Feel free to post your benchmarks in the comments section below!
