Re: Ram Drive

From: Gareth Tuckwell (ContactGT_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 11/17/04 

Date: Wed, 17 Nov 2004 17:41:05 GMT

"w_tom" <w_tom1@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:419A641D.6A0D2C25@hotmail.com...
> DOS did not do pre-emptive multi-tasking. Therefore the
> program had to wait for data to be written to disk drive.
> Today we have multi-tasking. Data is literally left in memory
> for another program to write it to the disk. What you want to
> do with a Ram Drive is now called cache. Already part of the
> OS. Your Ram drive would only slow the system by adding more
> work and probably creating more memory faults (virtual memory
> access to hard drive).

You are half right!! Hard drives do have a certain amount of cache - mine is
2MB I think, but the temporary files I am talking about 'cacheing' on a ram
drive total just over 600MB, so my 2MB cache on the real hard disk is waaaay
too small!!

I am talking about effectively creating a hard disk in memory, which the OS
will treat as a hard disk and store temporary build files and precompiled
header files at RAM speed not hard disk speed. This would speed up the build
of my 22 environment C++ application by a significant amount!

A Ram drive would not slow the system down!! I don't have figures to hand,
but compare access time on a hard disk with access time for pc2700 memory -
I think you'll find the memory wins!! Using one quarter of my 2GB RAM as a
RAM drive would not cause any more memory faults as you suggest. Besides,
with this much RAM, I have virtual memory turned off!

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