Ram Drives

I heard about these things from my former high school teacher, who is very much into computers; he told me that they are "the fastest thing on earth," but also that they require about 4-8 Gig!!! of RAM. Apparently you can run programs off these Ram drives, presumably the most demanding programs you have. My questions are, has anybody else heard about these things, how do they work, and are they worth the price you'd have to pay for the amount of RAM you'd need? Thanks in advance.



Davis Goertzen

Every program you run, runs off your RAM, so I don't know what you're (he) is talking about.

It is a PCI card that uses RAM to act as a HDD. You can install windows one one in less than 5 minutes, and once you do, startup takes 5-10 seconds. They have limited capacity (4-8GB, like you said) but they are fast. They are only limited by the PCI bus speed.

they also require a constant power source

i cant imagine a use that would require it, i think its just for fun

Oh you're talking about NVRAM (non-volatile). And no they don't require constant power, heyman.

Technically, they do, but they have a battery, so you don't have to worry about it.

I don't know... maybe if you were into heavy image making or something, it would be worth it to have windows, photoshop, and whatever you are working on at the time loaded onto it, and keep everything else on a second hard drive.

Okay, thanks, that answers a few of my questions, but where you most likely use it? Stuff like high-end gaming, movie-editing, that kind of thing? I'm also wondering, how much faster would they be than a dual-core machine (or something else comparable)? Also, would you end up killing yourself with the cost of RAM you'd need? Thanks for all the input.



Davis

i can't think of a single use for it

it's too small for audio or video editing of any kind

i suppose the best use would be to load a cd/dvd image onto it and use it as a virtual drive.......

So then, if I want the speed that a RAM drive would (apparently) give, I would really be better off just to save up for a dual-core processor or something like that?



Davis

There is no way to match the crazy speed of a RAM drive with anything other than a RAM drive. And a faster processor doesn't have anything to do with this kind of speed... it's the read/write speed of the memory. The only thing close to it would be a 15K RPM SCSI hard drive.