AMD Radeon RAMDisk Review Comment Thread

[SKYMTL]

With memory prices on the decline and Intel's RST caching offering a great solution for budget conscious buyers, AMD is reviving the idea of memory-based application acceleration. Called Radeon RAMDisk, it promises to reduce load times to mere seconds on even the most basic of systems.

Read more here: AMD Radeon RAMDisk Review

[BlueByte]

Just a quick note about the amd RAM drive, you can use NTFS if you create an unformatted drive and then use the windows system disk manager to format it.

I do find the drive images unreliable over time though, it's more reliable to run without a image of the ramdisk, this limits you to fat32 unless you scripted a format each boot as well. Then batch your program files to copy over. I use a bunch of ram disk products and they all have issues that would prevent me from suggesting them for anyone non techy.

[belgolas]

I have thought about going Ramdisk as I went Ramcache and didn't really see a performance improvement.

[borandi]

This is an AMD Branded version of RAMDisk from Dataram:
RAMDisk - Software - Server Memory Products & Services - Dataram

Anyone with an ASRock motherboard can use XFast RAM in order to do the same thing and have no space limitations.

[Cptn Vortex]

What size RAMDisk did you use for the reviews?

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by Cptn Vortex

What size RAMDisk did you use for the reviews?

.
.
.

We chose a 24GB partition which was set to autosave a compressed image every 5 minutes to the C drive in order to maximize data safety. In addition, the “Load the image on startup” option was enabled so the system would have quick access to the information stored on the RAMDisk.

[SugarJ]

I see this in the cons "- NTFS not supported only FAT16 & FAT32", but didn't find mention of it anywhere else in the article. That's a fairly important restriction, no?

[frontier204]

Which drive(s) did you have attached when you were doing the Windows 7 boot test, and if there was more than one, were the Radeon RAMDisk and OS running off the same drive?

Also, can you measure how much data the RAMDisk writes to the drive every "AutoSave"? I'd imagine it's not the whole 24GB as most drives can't actually write that much in 300 seconds, but I'd guess it's still enough to eat a ton of write cycles if you were to save to an SSD.

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by SugarJ

I see this in the cons "- NTFS not supported only FAT16 & FAT32", but didn't find mention of it anywhere else in the article. That's a fairly important restriction, no?

Not really. The OS can still be used as NTFS while the RAM drive will be under the FAT file system.

[Ardric]

Why didn't you bench the ramdisk against system RAM buffercache? It would've been pretty simple and it's the only relevant real-world comparison. For example, after launching an app from SSD the first time and recording the time, just close the app, then launch it again. The 2nd launch from SSD will actually be faster than the 1st launch from ramdisk for most apps, because it's coming out of system ram, but you didn't even bother to test it. This review is silly IMHO.