KVR Audio

THE INTRANCER · Post by **THE INTRANCER** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 4:55 pm

The Ram Disk, isn't something that I've and I'd suspect others here have not known about, however today on youtube I did discover this. I've probably seen it many years ago but just didn't pay much heed to the possibilities it might bring... but it does have me curious again about what practical uses this could bring for the creative user... Is it something you use...and if so, for what purpose...?

In the following video after the initial setup of it he takes you through, he presents how much faster the computational tasks are when it's used, if you take him by his word...by that I mean it's not a comparative test.

For reference, the free version of the utility program he links to provides just 1 Gig. (Other options have a price tag). But it's enough to see if this program is useful to you. As ever with dealing with disk drives, perform this process with care and ensure that you are selecting the correct drive. Unallocated, isn't selected by default, you need to select this yourself, and to follow the same process as he has shown.

VariKusBrainZ · Post by **VariKusBrainZ** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 7:46 pm

Why 2 threads?

THE INTRANCER · Post by **THE INTRANCER** » Sat Jun 09, 2018 7:56 pm

VariKusBrainZ wrote:Why 2 threads?

I didn't create 2 threads, an admin has moved it, the original thread remains though as a re-directional link when clicked on, and thus the reason for this illusion.

GreyLion · Post by **GreyLion** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 2:07 am

Wow. I haven't even thought about RAM drives since the DOS days, when disks and CPUs were slow and programs were tiny, and you could actually see a performance increase.

Wonder what the actual real-world differences might be for us with music making, in this time of SSDs and fast multicore CPUS.

That said, I'm about to double the RAM in my rig and have contemplated turning off paging to see what happens. If you have enough memory on-board, that might be a better solution.

THE INTRANCER · Post by **THE INTRANCER** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 3:25 am

GreyLion wrote:Wow. I haven't even thought about RAM drives since the DOS days, when disks and CPUs were slow and programs were tiny, and you could actually see a performance increase.

Wonder what the actual real-world differences might be for us with music making, in this time of SSDs and fast multicore CPUS.

That said, I'm about to double the RAM in my rig and have contemplated turning off paging to see what happens. If you have enough memory on-board, that might be a better solution.

It's much much faster than SSD's. SSD's have a typical speed of between 500 - 700 MB per second, compare that to DDR3 1600 Mhz ram, which is able to process 25 Gigabytes per second where speed is concerned... but with faster RAM, the differences would obviously be higher.

NS=Nanaoseconds

Storage | Read/Write speed | Access time
RAM | 100 GB/s | 50.00 ns
SSD | 500 MB/s | 0.05 ms
HDD | 100 MB/s | 5.00 ms

GreyLion · Post by **GreyLion** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 5:06 am

Sure, I get that, but look at the scales you're working with. Nanoseconds and half-GBs and such. Are we even going to be able to notice any difference? I haven't spent any time on researching this, but I suspect that stuff like your CAS latency settings, interrupt priorities, ASIO buffer settings, and other generic tuning of hardware and software might have just as much influence. And how often, really, are you wanting to continuously stream more than a half a gig of data back and forth across the bus, over and over?

It's always about bandwidth. If you're not already filling the entire pipeline, making the pipeline bigger doesn't matter.

Not trying to be argumentative for the sake of it, just wondering if there's actually a benefit. Certainly worth trying out, I guess?

DJ Warmonger · Post by **DJ Warmonger** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:18 am

In Ableton you can already choose to load any sample to RAM explicitely. Never needed to do that, however, until I tried to run 50+ multitrack from HD. Either way, in realistic scenarios music projects are not limited by HD bandwidth.

pekbro · Post by **pekbro** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:19 am

The main problem with a Ram Disk, is that if your machine loses power unexpectedly for whatever reason,
everything on the disk at the time is lost, end of story.

Slaapstadseun · Post by **Slaapstadseun** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 6:33 am

I do video and photo editing and having an 8GB RAM disk makes a huge difference when batch editing hundreds of large RAW photos or rendering video.
AMD has a free util which lets you create the RAM disk, and gives options for auto back-up to a different drive every x minutes. The RAM disk can be persistent - it does not disappear when you reboot. I haven't tested this, but the RAM disk seems way faster than my SSD.

lfm · Post by **lfm** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 8:58 am

THE INTRANCER wrote: It's much much faster than SSD's. SSD's have a typical speed of between 500 - 700 MB per second, compare that to DDR3 1600 Mhz ram, which is able to process 25 Gigabytes per second where speed is concerned... but with faster RAM, the differences would obviously be higher.

NS=Nanaoseconds

Storage | Read/Write speed | Access time
RAM | 100 GB/s | 50.00 ns
SSD | 500 MB/s | 0.05 ms
HDD | 100 MB/s | 5.00 ms

1.6 GHz clockspeed for RAM would make 25 GB/s?
I think 1 byte each clock cycle is fair assumption.
You cannot go by access time - it's what cpu can get hold of that makes a difference.

So in theory roughly three times the speed of SSD or something.
To even notice a difference it's double speed.

Look at benchmarks for cpu with 2400 MHz clock for ram and it's not double rating of 1366 MHz. But cpu clockspeed though pretty much follows benchmark rating.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/

Don't forget - read/write cache is on HDD at least - and that is RAM.
I don't think system bothers with read cache on SSD even, but could be wrong.

And L2 and L3 cache on CPU is taking some heat too. About 8 MB or so these days as I recall.

I doubt RAM disk is anything to bother with these days.

Tj Shredder · Post by **Tj Shredder** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 12:34 pm

The only use case where it could make sense, is if you run 32-bit software in a 64-bit operating system and have more memory than 4 GB. Think about it!
If 64-bit software isn't able to use the memory directly, its badly written...
Already in the 90s it was usually a scam...

THE INTRANCER · Post by **THE INTRANCER** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 4:28 pm

Found this video, which should give some solid stats of just how much faster RAM Disks are..., whilst another video from Linus explains how it works and the possible uses for RAM Disks.

THE INTRANCER · Post by **THE INTRANCER** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 5:09 pm

pekbro wrote:The main problem with a Ram Disk, is that if your machine loses power unexpectedly for whatever reason,
everything on the disk at the time is lost, end of story.

Not when you have the cache set on the storage device you have set. Any changes are stored incrementally, but just like any other writing to disk task, cutting power mid stream isn't recommended. You can disable the RAM Disk and re-enable the Ram Disk at any time you wish. With the free version I provided above in my first post, you can see the memory increase and be cut depending on whether it's active or not. Remember when you set this up to retain your data, you are actually setting aside a portion of your disk as a save point, so you don't lose anything, even if you lose power.

pekbro · Post by **pekbro** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 7:21 pm

Well that makes a lot of sense, using a ram disk because of its speed, then
caching it back to disk.

BertKoor · Post by **BertKoor** » Sun Jun 10, 2018 7:47 pm

You're all doing this all the time already! It's called "cache" ...

THE RAM DISK - Accelerating Audio / Video Processing