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thebritishguy

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 30, 2011
56
0
So with the price of 16GB DDR3 falling (have already made the jump), allocating a 2GB Ramdisk seems to be a no brainerin terms of available resources, but what to use it for? Obviously it should be something that does not need be persistent between power cycles.

Here are some thoughts, if anyone knows how to execute or has experience on any of the below it would be of great interest

  • Safari Cache (other browsers too)
  • Photoshop/In Design Scratch disk
  • Temporary area for holding WIP files images
  • Other?

For reference purposes here are some Xbench Hard Disk Scores from my 13"MBP, the speed of the Ramdisk cannot be denied..

  • Ramdisk: 1386.89
  • Crucial M4 128GB (primary Sata interface): 398.96
  • MomentusXT500 (secondary Sata interface): 40.64
 

parapup

macrumors 65816
Oct 31, 2006
1,291
49
If the OS is doing its job (caching recently used stuff in memory and using all available RAM) you should not be needing ram disk.

I am fairly certain all modern OSes (Win/Mac/Linux) do aggressive caching of recently used files - so your binary is in RAM already when you load it second time, the file your program is reading from / writing to is buffered in cache already and read ahead. That sort of obviates the use of ram disk imho.
 
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