AMD Radeon RAMDisk
 

Was reading a thread on the cpu&mb board, and sky mentioned the AMD RAMDisk.
That really intrigued me, so I googled it. Apparently you can get it right now.
Downloads

I've played with RAMdisks in the past, and the problem I encountered was from the nature of RAM itself. Once you shutdown, you need to reload all the data onto the RAMdisk again. However I can't find anything on AMD site on whether or not this is address or how exactly their software works.

So does anyone have any experience or insight on this? Especially if you have a system with 32GB of RAM.

Having just bought a system with 32 GB of RAM I'm keenly interested in this discussion too. I'm thinking there must be a way to use the RAMdisk to store all those temporary files that Windows makes that you don't need to save anyway. But I'm just guessing.

This software creates a Vdisk image that is loaded up when you start the OS and saved back to your disk when you shut down. It does slow down your boot up times. Some of the windows temp folders have issues in ram disks and this software does seem to die a terrible death randomly, ie freezes on large ram disk saves to the hard drive when you go to shut down or stop the ram disk(maybe this has been fixed???).

At one point I played with having steam installed on my ram disk and every time I launched a game it would run a batch file that moved the game over to the install folder on the RAMDISK and then launched the game to reduce load times.... Then I invested in a RAID 0 SSD setup that pumped through 1.5GB/s writes and 1.8GB/s reads not as fast but less hassle and still damn fast.

The one place I still use ram disks are VM testing, its an impressive day when you overload a SQL instance in a RAMdisk.

They have their place, depends on what you want to do and if your ok with slower start up and shut down times. And losing what ever is currently on the RAMDISK. in reality you are probably not really going to notice the difference for the headache of playing with it constantly. I know photo shop guys use them for scratch disks and notice huge gains, or as stated above SQL can handle huge I/O.... but day to day.... meh

To truly utilize it, you need to BUY the software.

According to the small print, AMD has rebranded DataRAM's RAMDisk software for use on both Intel & AMD platforms. It may not be anything new, but I certainly hope that the support is there.

I did buy the software(before any AMD deal) and tried to utilize it for a bunch of things, honestly this software is more robust and you can dump more windows system folders onto it then the DATAram product.

RamDisk - Microsoft Certified Software

if you are going to spend money on a ramdisk this one is better. Costs more though so I guess you get what you pay for.

I don't really see the point of a ramdisk now that we have modern OS's with buffer cache. Get lots of system RAM, enable deep delayed writes, and pre-load your cache, and bingo you've got all the speed of a RAM disk without any of the hassle. More speed even... system RAM is faster than video RAM because of the PCIe bottleneck. It works automatically, so why pre-allocate cache manually and do a worse job than the system already does?

I actually used that superspeed ramdisk. Although it was only a 1GB drive because I didn't have much RAM back then (and now).
But yeah, only noticed a few things load/work faster and longer bootup times. All in all, not very practical outside of very specific uses.