Gadgetory

three hundred six hundred twenty-five hundred megabytes per second solid-state drives or SSDs are fantastic and it brought us super quick storage performance with lower power consumption and without the fragile moving parts of mechanical hard drives but what if you want to go even faster well the absolute fastest storage solution you can have in a desktop ring anyway is a ram drive which is just what it sounds like setting aside a certain amount of RAM to use as well a really really fast drive so why is RAM good for this then you see part of the reason we use Ram as the working memory for whatever the computer is doing at a given time instead of using a hard drive or even a regular SSD for that is because Ram is extremely fast this allows the computer to read and write the data that it needs to act upon without having to wait around and this paradigm has existed since long before long-term solid-state storage became mainstream in fact the first Ram Drive software came about all the way back in 1980 so just how fast are we talking about then well depending on your configuration you can get sequential read and write speeds in the neighborhood of seven to ten gigabytes per second or more that's like downloading an entire dual layer blu-ray in five seconds and even if you're not working with massive sequential files like you'd see with audio editing or video and image rendering you can still get a big performance boost with programs that access small amounts of data very frequently I mean think about your web browsers cache for example because Ram drives have very low latency or access delay with very high ions the number of operations per second so how then do you set this up well there are a number of applications that you can find with a quick and easy Google search that will convert free memory into a ram drive for you just tell it how big of a round ride you'd like to make assign a drive letter and you are pretty much good to go after that Windows will recognize your RAM Drive just like it would any other storage device connected to your system so you'll be free to copy files and install programs to it as you normally would but even though system memory is much cheaper these days there are other costs associated with storing anything resembling important data on a ram drive anyone who's ever suffered a power outage while they were doing something important on their PC has probably learned the hard way that Ram is what is called volatile that means that its contents disappear when you power off your system so some Ram Drive utilities will backup the contents of your Ram disk to a hard drive or SSD for you periodically but this will still mean long delays on shutdown while it purges and on boot while the RAM Drive fills so sorry if you were hoping to store your operating system on a ram disk this pretty much kibosh is that unless you're like a computer magician or you buy a super expensive hardware based Ram disk solution with like battery backup which is very rare outside of an enterprise setting and because of platform not to mention cost limitations Ram disks aren't great for storing tons of stuff either the most standard unbuffered memory that can fit on even the highest end consumer motherboards these days is a hundred and twenty eight gigabytes and since your operating system and other applications will need some of that space as well the largest Ram disk you can comfortably make will be a little bit less than that but don't let any of that discourage you if you've got some excess RAM sitting around and you'd like to see just how blisteringly fast you can make your storage experience this is a fun little science fair project and free there are free ones and can possibly even be useful for frequently used programs or applications that are otherwise bottlenecked by drive speed especially as you can increase read and write speeds even further by overclocking your CPU and RAM or by tightening up your memory timings however if you're putting anything resembling crucial data on a ram drive even savegames okay anything that's going to waste your time invest in a ups for your rig as well because I'm sure you don't want to have your world record speed run your taxes or your weird political manifesto wiped out because your cat decided to chew on your power cord speaking of chewing here's something to chew on with a lynda.com membership you can watch and learn from top experts who are passionate about teaching so whether you're sitting there going gee I'd really like to move up in my career or gee I love taking pictures of things as a hobby but what if I could do it in a way that other people might actually enjoy watching those slideshows that I'm constantly putting in front of them well Linda is the way to go for that they've got thousands of video courses that you can stream or watch vod's if you download them to your compatible iOS or Android device and it lets you learn on your own schedule at your 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