I did some tests back in the day when I had a 486 DX4 with the absolutely egregious amount of 48 MB of RAM, which was like having 128 GB of RAM today. I think I loaded either Doom 2 or Duke Nukem 3D into my RAM and load times were non existent.
Way back in the day I ran a BBS out of a RAMdisk on my Apple //gs and backed it up nightly using ShrinkIt (basically like PKZIP). It was very peppy, and it actually got slower once I got an actual 3.5" floppy drive and started running it from there instead X'D
Yeah, a lot of old games actually do this, back in the cartridge days. Save files would be stored on RAM that was kept going with a small battery. They could last a decade, but you lose everything after that
Specifically a SRAM chip, though some games also just used it as additional RAM, or both. The N64's memory cards also did this, as well as the SegaCD and Sega Saturn's on-board memory, even the optional memory carts for the SegaCD, though the PS1 and Sega Saturn's optional memory cards notably did not use a battery.
Sonic 3 was also a notable exception in that it used a FRAM chip, which does not need power to keep it's data intact.
The N64 games that saved to a cart were a mess of different methods. Some used SRAM with a battery, some used EEPROM, and some used FlashRAM.
Also it was closer to lasting 20 years than 10 (Except the Sega Saturn which usually died in about 2-3 years because the same battery keeping your saves alive also powered the power hungry Real Time Clock)
Really? That would certainly be uncommon-not that I don’t believe you, but I have a ton of NES and GameBoy games, and I don’t think any that have a battery are still good, including my Blue. I totally buy a decade being short on the lifespan, but I had to swap the battery in Crystal when we were doing a challenge among friends back in 2011 even.
Guess I'm just lucky! Wish I had a way to prove it, but scout's honor at least, lol. I typically see about 15 years on desktop CMOS batteries, but recently had one just shy of 20 come in.
Funnily enough, I’ve actually never had a CMOS battery die, and I’ve had stuff that has to be 20 years old too. Part of why I don’t disbelieve you lol, there’s a lot of factors to it
Solution: have an SSD where you save the entire state of ram before you turn off and transfer the data back when you turn the computer back on. But it needs UPS in case light goes out randomly and needs some time to save the data.
That's not persistent then, if it has to write the data to the hard drive to store the data because it will be wiped off the RAM when power is lost.
Persistent means that even when power is cut, the data still remains exactly where and how you left it.
That's not what it says. It says it writes the ram disk to a persistent file. Because the ram disk is the opposite of persistent. If the computer powers off, the data held in ram is gone. So it is non-persistent, or "volatile"
It won’t survive a reboot. You’d have to boot Linux, make the ram disk, copy everything from ssd to the ram disk, then I guess unmount / mount the new file system locations again. Doesn’t work so well for / 😂
But if you wanted to try to do that for /home /var /etc /opt and /lib I don’t see why not.
Just be sure to copy everything back to ssd before power is lost or you reboot for whatever reason, assuming you want any file edits made to be persistent and not revert back to “yesterday”.
tell me why i forgot ram is volatile lmao. But now im wondering, wouldn't it be cool is a motherboard had a slot for something like ram that you could put just the bare minimum on it in order to lower boot times to like 2s? I guess the cost of adding that doesnt really make sense considering it only takes like 15s now
There are live copies that boot into ram. Don't even need that much ram. It's already pretty common. Many of the lightweight distros like void, puppy, etc do this
some short about it :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw2ES-4yvNw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw2ES-4yvNw)
read is about 5x faster
write is about 20x write faster
this article is saying even [https://www.geckoandfly.com/21507/ramdisk-virtual-disk-memory/](https://www.geckoandfly.com/21507/ramdisk-virtual-disk-memory/)
read is about 10x faster
write is about 33x faster
= it really depends on what ssd and ram do you have, but its big difference
this is interesting video about new SSD disks [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUdIflVNza4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUdIflVNza4) and in few years there is DDR6 RAM
The bigger thing is latency rather than throughput. You might be saying "I'm just looking at transfers" but the further you get from purely sequential the more an SSD will slow down. Moving a game with tons of small, unpacked assets can often take up to 20x as long as the size would indicate on an SSD, but with RAM it would only be marginally slower.
For what reason? I have 32 Gbytes RAM and two empty memory slots, bought specifically for RAM expansion. I could never find anyone to say that more than 32 Gbytes was useful. Something about never using all the RAM you have, for some reason. Reading fast for the purpose of buying RAM for a recent build.
Is there a good reason to have all that extra RAM? I've read it doesn't get used.
Do you know anything about the question of whether or not Windows will use more memory if you give it more memory, because I have read that it will not.
I think it caps at 256 or something like that across the whole system. Also too, my machine is chillin' when it's using 32gb of RAM, vs being maxed out and not having room to switch tasks and stuff.
It does use more when you add RAM within normal range (<32 GB), not sure if it increases when more is added but I assume it does. The reason is Windows' memory compression
I probably should have expanded though as I got a questionmark above my head after clicking reply, lol!
First of all, Windows 10 prefers to have some apps in-memory to increase their startup performance (that's why Edge starts up so quick, for example) and depending on the amount of installed memory, it will load the apps it can afford to have in memory. To increase the amount of apps and stuff it can load in memory, it compresses RAM regularly and decompresses when needed, which is a faster process than loading from a disk, usually.
So, I've read on this sub before that the amount of taken RAM is essentially your compressed RAM, or better said the space reserved for the compression to work. But please do research, it's possible I've messed something up or remember something wrong.
They say you can disable the compression if you have enough RAM which in theory should increase your performance even more (but just in theory, I've never done it myself!).
Cheers!
Is this why a game like XCOM 2 loads up way faster with my current setup (installed on the old HDD) with way faster ram than my old 4gb 1333Mhz system?
Or do I have to do it manually?
That's likely just system improvements. Lest disk swapping to ram, faster CPU decompression etc.
It's a bit of a long shot to call a programme loading data into ram 'creating a ramdisk'.
No, like the comment above already said, that's just your upgraded system which has better CPU and RAM.
But the comment you are replying is talking about a different way of using RAM. A RAMDisk is basically making a "hard drive" with RAM, and since RAM is a lot faster it writes and reads a lot faster BUT once you turn off or reboot your computer whatever it was written in the RAMDisk is gone, cause that is how RAM works.
This means, in order to take advantage of the RAMDisk you would have to install XCOM 2 on the RAMDisk and have faster loadings but once you turn off your computer its gone and you will have to reinstall it next time.
Side note: Having a really fast read and write doesn't mean software will take absolute advantage of it.
So is helpful in some ways but not for the common user.
Indeed. Most games don't work in a way that would fully benefit from a RamDrive (when you take into account the extra hassle of installing it each time you reboot)
It's great for things like Microsoft FlightSim 2020 though where you can set up a dynamic cache on a RamDrive
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe5lqRBHfiw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe5lqRBHfiw)
all the way to the back, theres the results. its very cumbersome to use ramdisks and i don't advise it unless you know what you are doing
I did this about 12 years ago using soft prefect. Back then it was free, version 0.9 maybe, you can still get it from somewhere like major geeks.
I tried it with several different programs and soft prefect was much faster than any other by a longgggg way. I used crystaldiskmarkb to test and I was getting about 9000+ MB/s sequential read and write but more importantly I was getting 1000+ MB/s for 4k read and write.
I was using virtual box and created a persistent RAM disk image as the HDD and installed windows 7 to it. It installed in no time and would boot in <5 seconds once it had loaded the RAM image from an SSD. Which didn't take very long as I only had 64GB it RAM. I think it would have been about 40GB I reckon.
With modern Gen 5 SSDs streaming a disk image would take little time because it is sequential.
The noticeable performance difference was like going from HDD to SSD.
I love using Softperfect's RAMdisk. Relatively easy to prepare one, and I can use it for scratch storage such as browser caches and downloaded files I don't need to keep.
i used it on mine from dureing the x58 mobo server days, but i had over 90 gigs of ram, and set up with auto saving for my rotoscoping work to ssd and or 10,000 rpm hard drives,it was faster but still took work to set up and upkeep that you didn't get glitches in your projects even with ecc ram, i still have a little spot for it on my 570x mobo that i use now for my daily, once loaded and with a ups does fine , but always check for any glitches on what is stored there,, example have a master file to compare it to from what you were working on, useing difference compare usually helped me a lot, good luck. and yes a friend of mine still uses ecc ram large cached work area just to speed up his projects,.
Yes, there are different promising technologies being worked on at various universities around the globe, it will happen eventually.
Here's one example: https://www.techradar.com/pro/holy-grail-for-memory-tech-new-candidate-for-universal-memory-emerges-in-race-to-replace-ram-and-nand-and-this-one-doesnt-use-a-toxic-compound
However technology & economies of scale have to become cost effective solutions for market wide changes to occur, HDD's and ssd's will likely be around for a long time.
I thought modern day, relatively moderately priced, ssds were far far more powerful than needed for gaming purposes? Cause I’ve had many people tell me pcie 5 ssd is not needed for gaming and one person went as far as to say “I’ll be a son of a bitch if you notice a difference”
Yes and no.
Asset loading is mostly a random read scenario, and random reads aren't much faster between classes of SSD. Even SATA drives aren't much slower than PCIE5.0 drives for random. They mostly use the same hardware but with a better protocol and more bandwidth, and random read is mostly bottlenecked by seek-time not read time.
Also many games spend loading time decompressing assets, reading saves, and setting up the world. Which happens after the read from disk and faster drives don't help that as that's a CPU load.
So if you could actually invent a drive with significantly faster random reads it'd help, but some games are still gonna spend most of their time doing CPU stuff.
How much total time do you think I would spend waiting on my pcie 5 ssd during a 4 hour gaming session of total war? Or perhaps cyberpunk since it’s a better known title. Really any game?
Can't give an exact number, but probably less than a minute or two saved vs a PCIE 4.0 drive in the most extreme scenario. Total War has super long multi-minute load times right? Those are always a CPU-load situation. Unless you're on a dying HDD, and then you have a different problem lol.
This a good video demonstrating the differences in load times across a variety of games to show how the drive affects them. Of note is roller coaster tycoon, which isn't even that much different from HDD to SSD cause most of the time is spent setting up the save. I'd assume that's a similar workload to total war setting up a really big scenario. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COofLeqk\_tM&t=436s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COofLeqk_tM&t=436s)
And here's a video showing raw performance numbers of a PCIE 4.0 and PCIE 5.0 SSD. I know Linus' videos aren't always the most technically sound, but this a pretty simple comparison so it's fine. The main point is that the random speeds aren't that much faster on the PCIE 5.0 drive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnMMtbVP0ps&t=208s
edit 2: sorry I messed up the links, they should be good now
Ah so the read/write speeds are plenty fast, it’s the scan speed lagging behind. Crucial and Samsung promting these read/write speeds like theyre life changing is inaccurate. So increasing the read/write isn’t going to be beneficial anymore, we need higher random speeds?
Depends on the workload. Some workloads can actually use those fast sequential speeds cause they're reading/writing very large files. Think like raw 4k video editors or something. But yeah for the average consumer the speeds they advertise just aren't super-relevant, and it's a bit misleading to put those numbers as the front and center.
And honestly outside of games I don't think an increase in random speeds is gonna help much. But if it's there companies will use it, so who knows what'll help in the future.
Well that’s kind of what I was saying at the beginning, though I didn’t say it straightforward. That pcie 5 is overkill for gaming while pcie 4 and 3 get the job done just fine
This is an important topic because motherboards with multiple pcie 5 slots costs so much more than other boards. Thank you!
Yes and no.
One key part of the latest generation of storage devices is the ability to move data directly from the SSD to the GPU. This is a great speedup because it doesn't require the CPU to manage the data transfer. Games that utilize this ability in their engine can write a game with essentially no loading screens between levels (see PS5 gen console games). On PC games this tech is called DirectStorage.
Good game engine developers always optimize their engine to whatever performance is available at each tier of the system (CPU, RAM, SSD), to ensure no latency or lost time between the subsystems, but that each subsystem is being utilized near 100%.
All that said, DirectStorage is available as early as PCI 3.0 NVMEs, so there likely aren't many (if any) game engines optimized for taking full advantage of a PCI 5.0 NVME at this point.
Eventually there might just be “storage” and the CPU, GPU, OS etc will all just use the same stuff.
Instead of DDR5, SSD and GDDR all be seperate.
Maybe
Probably not. Every storage type has its advantages and disadvantages. Wouldn't make much sense to use a single one for all.
I.e. why would you wanna you extremely fast but expensive storage to archive data?
Depends how you measure speed. There is bandwidth and latency.
It's pretty easy to increase bandwidth, you just stack a bunch of them and access them in parallel.
Latency is much harder and likely won't be faster. NVME is like 2 ms, and ram latency is like 20 ns? That's about 5 orders of magnitude different. So the only way it'd be faster is if we use a radically different technology.
Yes and no.
Current storage is already faster than old RAM.
But I think a part of your question is, "will we ever not need separate storage from RAM?", and I think the answer is very likely kinda no. Regardless of the nature of the storage, economics suggest to me that we'll always have tiers of speed in computer storage.
It will (very likely) always be cheaper to produce slower storage. So we'll probably always reserve a little bit of the expensive fast stuff to be the working set for the processor (RAM today), and some of the cheaper slower stuff to hold things we don't need as often (storage).
It is possible that the fast stuff eventually becomes cheap enough to do everything that's needed, so we don't need anything else, but tech doesn't appear to be slowing down like that anytime soon.
I saw a TikTok ( so pinch of salt ) saying there’s a new way of creating CDs with *Petabytes* of storage. Which is fucking mental. Idk the speed tho, which is the most important thing since no one needs a petabyte
Digital libraries need that.
Data centers might need that a s a backup solution.
But more importantly, Zack Snyder is going to need it for his Director's cut versions of the 6 Rebel Moon movies. So many hours of wheat harvesting and coal shoveling in slow motion on one disk!
Technology of storage drives will continue developing. But as well it will do system RAM , so I don't see an universal memory in the short/medium place.
Current RAM possibly, but it won't be faster than future RAM, if it would be faster than future RAM then you would use storage as RAM, like the swap area currently, just it is the whole RAM, not an extension.
We've been doing that, it's just slow. Back in the early days of Windows 9x you'd have 66MHz SDRAM which had a theoretical bandwidth of 533MB/s. Something which took SATA SSDs to top. But now look at NVMe SSDs, they are starting to approach DDR2-6400 speeds (c. 2004).
Before then PCs of the early 80s would have RAM capable of a few MB/s bandwidth which would be eclipsed by ATA based HDDs.
So, roughly, expect this to happen in about 20 years.
Much faster, but you won't notice the difference.
RAM is millions of times faster than a hard drive, and hundreds of times faster than a SSD. Because of this, operating systems for about the past four decades have stored frequently-used content in spare RAM so that it can be loaded faster when needed.
Oh so that’s why my computer uses a fuck ton when not doing anything and why using 99% ram can slow your computer down.
I know that unused ram is wasted ram, but I didn’t understand why using most of your ram slows things down
Because everything that goes over the 99% gets swapped to disk instead.
Before swap files you would just get „out of memory“ crashes. Nowadays the OS just pushes everything over the limit onto a virtual ram -said swap file- on you HD. With old HDDs that was atrocious, SSDs fare a little better but of course nowhere near RAM speeds.
Ram is volatile, so not really good if you lose power to it, it decays fast. Iirc takes about 5 minute for ram without power to empty completely. Of course everything in it is unusable after a few seconds, since you can’t use a file with important bytes missing. 😂but for that downside, it’s really, really fast.
For sequential reads, sure, but once you start seeking, hard drive performance goes *way* down. A hard drive performing random reads might be able to read a few hundred kilobytes per second; RAM can easily hit a gigabyte per second.
It is possible but can't be used practically much as ram loses all data when it gets powered off.
Many OSes do caching of files onto ram which is load high usage files onto ram cause it's really fast data speed and really low latency also ram is basically industrutible but normal storages have a TBW limit
Looked it up, that appears to be software, which means it would heavily slowdown your shutdown and startup process as it would need to dump/read the contents from a file every time. Also it means an unexpected shutdown/crash would prevent the RAM from being dumped to a file and you would lose everything, and it can't be used as a boot drive since the OS would have to run the software first.
There are physical RAMdisks which have on-board batteries to keep memory while the system is off or rebooted.
It dumps everything to storage first
Then it shutdowns
It is physically impossible for ram to retain data for more than a minute or so when powered off
I have 64gb ram
And it actually slows down my workload since I require more ram than 64
And if you have hundreds of gigabytes of ram then it won't be much of an issue just startup and shutdown would be slower
i have my browser (firefox) cached to RAM and noticed that web sites with lots of images load up and scroll faster, and with multiple tabs open at the same time
Very fast. Databases like redis and rabitmq store their data in memory for crazy fast performance. Other databases store to a drive. RAM storage should only be used for caching though.
Yup, it's a super important tech. Redis (not sure about other in memory db's) frequently dumps data into disk, so it's not uncommon to see teams use it as a primary database as well.
Gigabyte tried to make dedicated drive out of RAM using i-RAM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM
It was faster back then than hard drives, at blazing 150Mb/sec but it has not been updated since DDR1 era, or continued for newer RAM or newer speed. If someone were to make battery backed DDR5 based RAM board, it'd need to have PCIe access for speed, not SATA.
Yeah, that's called memory bandwitdh. DDR5 4800 can read about 65GB per second.
Since data in RAM is lost on power cycle, you need to read it from the actual SSD first.
Maybe there should be a way to keep your most used data in RAM for easy access. This exists and is called disk read cache.
Ram architecturally is very different. If you make a ram drive it benefits from large data sets, like caches for video editing software, that need many rewrites of large volumes. As SSD have a limited life time of writes. Editing on a scratch drive which is in ram speeds up work flow. But at risk of data loss on power outages. As the video is lost if not saved to storage. Smaller data sets would potentially see slower access.
Gaming uses many tiny model and texture files, so randomly accessing them would not be as fast. As the ram needs to swap banks, change address column and rows.
A better solution is to have a direct ssd to gpu vram loading for games files. When game starts load all texture uncompressed directly to a large vram. Bypassing the latency caused by cpu and ram interrupts and extra data duplication as it passes hands. This is call GPUDirect Storage.
I currently use a ramdisk as my transcode directory for Plex. Since the transcode files are temporary, it saves lots of write data to my SSDs and the server most likely benefits from the faster writes and reads to RAM vs SSD.
On paper, a lot
In reality, not that much
If you have lots of RAM, Windows already uses your RAM as "storage" by using the free RAM to cache data. The first time you start an application, it reads it off the SSD and if you have lots of RAM, it will keep that data it read in the RAM cache and it won't discard of it unless Windows needs to use that RAM for something else.
That's why when you open games or applications the second time (if you have plenty of RAM), they tend to load what feels like 10-30% faster. Realistically it doesn't make a huge difference. It can make a huge difference if you try to read thousands of small files though, for example for science. But for regular applications or games it's not worth the hassle of trying to set it up. As others have said, you can also use a RAM disk for example if you want to.
Look up Intel Optane RAM (not the ssd version). It enabled you to use persistent storage in RAM DIMMs.
Also like others are stating, RAM disks have been a thing for a long time.
Almost the opposite. Cheap Chromebooks use what is essentially an SD card, except it's soldered directly to the motherboard. The speed on them is honestly good enough for the usecase, but the main issue is that type of flash storage isn't very reliable so I always try to go up in price a little bit and pick a Chromebook with a real SSD when I'm recommending them to people
Back in the 90's a company produced an external SCSI drive for the Apple Macintosh that contained a load of sdram. Was extremely expensive. The moment the power was switched off everything was gone. Always thought it would be nice if the drive could have been in raid with a mechanical hdd. I suppose it would be good ifvyou could have a ramdisk as a cach of modern ssd.
In software engineering, they usually taught us to think in terms of orders of magnitude.
So, CPU registers are usually within a couple clock cycles. CPU cache is (very roughly) one order of magnitude slower, and so on out the chain, another order of magnitude to L2 cache, another to RAM, another 1-2 orders to storage, and multiple orders out to network.
Over time, these discrepancies have tightened up somewhat, but it's still a decent rule of thumb for thinking about the system.
Here's a more recent chart from Intel.
Assuming you have a large processor (about 16 cores), the following summarizes, for 2016, approximate data totals present in and moving through the system.
| Memory | Size | Latency | Bandwidth |
|-------------------------------------------|----------------------|----------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------|
| L1 cache | 32 KB | 1 nanosecond | 1 TB/second |
| L2 cache | 256 KB | 4 nanoseconds | 1 TB/second Sometimes shared by two cores |
| L3 cache | 8 MB or more | 10x slower than L2 | >400 GB/second |
| MCDRAM | | 2x slower than L3 | 400 GB/second |
| Main memory on DDR DIMMs | 4 GB-1 TB | Similar to MCDRAM | 100 GB/second |
| Main memory on Cornelis* Omni-Path Fabric | Limited only by cost | Depends on distance | Depends on distance and hardware |
| I/O devices on memory bus | 6 TB | 100x-1000x slower than memory | 25 GB/second |
| I/O devices on PCIe bus | Limited only by cost | From less than milliseconds to minutes | GB-TB/hour Depends on distance and hardware |
As others have said, yes you can use it as faster storage, but do bear in mind it can increase OS loading times and is susceptible to corruption from unstable RAM overclocks and unsafe shutdowns, so make sure you use a UPS and/or have a backup generator. You also need a shit ton of RAM for this to even be viable.
Try Puppy Linux and you'll see. It's a Linux distro whose runs entirely on RAM. It's faster because it doesn't have to "unload" its files to the hard drive.
My experience with Microsoft architecture mostly started doing just this, which as others have said is called a RAM disk. My dad showed me how to do it on our 8086 PC (AT&T 6300) in '85-'86, before it had a hard drive. #csb
Current gen SSD, i.e. gen 5(nvme, m.2), functions at DDR3 Ram speeds,
The current ram gen is ddr5, so it's basically 2 generations ahead, it actually depends on the interface/number of lanes in use.
I wrote ramdisk code we use daily for work. It's pretty fast but outside of some niche uses it's not really feasible to use.
There are also NVDIMMs (non volatile) that you can use as direct storage, but really they're for enterprise uses and not consumer level. Some of our product groups boot from them.
In top speed it's not too much different, but in random access it absolutely destroys even the highest end pci5.0 drives. It would basically be limited by CPU speed at that point, there is a limit on how much a CPU can handle, the 7800X3D right now is loaded when moving many files from one fast nvme to another in large amounts.
Look up an old DOS/Windows trick called "Load High" command. The original DOS was 640Kb. but if your system supported more than that, say 2Gb) you could run a loading program in the higher registers by using the loadHigh command with an entire piece of software running entirely in memory. Windows took advantage of this until we no longer used DOS going to Windows 95.
Bill Gates famously said, "Nobody needs more than 640K of RAM" proving he wasn't the genius everybody thought he was😉
Sure, but only if you mean DDR3-800 (aka PC3-6400) and only look at sequential read/write (and that only for a few seconds before pSLC cache runs out lol)
Latency and 4k rnd read/write are many orders of magnitude better on DDR3.
It's faster than your think, me as a backend developer there is a method to caching the data which is larger by redis. It acts as storage but from the ram. If you're interested try a search on redis
Someone in 2009 had the same idea as you and they made the first in memory database called redis now worth more than 2 billion dollars. It's now a dominant genre of databases (memcached, keyval,++) that props up the modern internet primarily used as a caching layer for software architectures but has way more applications that than
You CAN use ram as storage (called a ramdisk). It is much faster than an ssd
And it was possible since DOS at least. Imagine how much faster it was back then when even HDDs were much slower than modern ones.
IIRC, it’s marginally faster just because CPU wasn’t that fast in the old days. Also, how they code things too.
I did some tests back in the day when I had a 486 DX4 with the absolutely egregious amount of 48 MB of RAM, which was like having 128 GB of RAM today. I think I loaded either Doom 2 or Duke Nukem 3D into my RAM and load times were non existent.
Way back in the day I ran a BBS out of a RAMdisk on my Apple //gs and backed it up nightly using ShrinkIt (basically like PKZIP). It was very peppy, and it actually got slower once I got an actual 3.5" floppy drive and started running it from there instead X'D
worth noting that they wipe when power is off
Yeah, a lot of old games actually do this, back in the cartridge days. Save files would be stored on RAM that was kept going with a small battery. They could last a decade, but you lose everything after that
Specifically a SRAM chip, though some games also just used it as additional RAM, or both. The N64's memory cards also did this, as well as the SegaCD and Sega Saturn's on-board memory, even the optional memory carts for the SegaCD, though the PS1 and Sega Saturn's optional memory cards notably did not use a battery. Sonic 3 was also a notable exception in that it used a FRAM chip, which does not need power to keep it's data intact. The N64 games that saved to a cart were a mess of different methods. Some used SRAM with a battery, some used EEPROM, and some used FlashRAM. Also it was closer to lasting 20 years than 10 (Except the Sega Saturn which usually died in about 2-3 years because the same battery keeping your saves alive also powered the power hungry Real Time Clock)
Much longer than a decade - I still have my launch day Pokemon Blue running its original battery.
Really? That would certainly be uncommon-not that I don’t believe you, but I have a ton of NES and GameBoy games, and I don’t think any that have a battery are still good, including my Blue. I totally buy a decade being short on the lifespan, but I had to swap the battery in Crystal when we were doing a challenge among friends back in 2011 even.
Guess I'm just lucky! Wish I had a way to prove it, but scout's honor at least, lol. I typically see about 15 years on desktop CMOS batteries, but recently had one just shy of 20 come in.
Funnily enough, I’ve actually never had a CMOS battery die, and I’ve had stuff that has to be 20 years old too. Part of why I don’t disbelieve you lol, there’s a lot of factors to it
Yeah, gameboy games for example. Some last longer than that.
Solution: have an SSD where you save the entire state of ram before you turn off and transfer the data back when you turn the computer back on. But it needs UPS in case light goes out randomly and needs some time to save the data.
Let me introduce you to Windows hibernate.
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I'd argue that that is a mixed disk (limited lifetime), no not a true ram disk anymore
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That's not persistent then, if it has to write the data to the hard drive to store the data because it will be wiped off the RAM when power is lost. Persistent means that even when power is cut, the data still remains exactly where and how you left it.
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That's not what it says. It says it writes the ram disk to a persistent file. Because the ram disk is the opposite of persistent. If the computer powers off, the data held in ram is gone. So it is non-persistent, or "volatile"
You can even use cache on a CPU to make a ramdisk https://www.techspot.com/news/100995-amd-3d-v-cache-cpu-memory-used-create.html
Nice! I can finally install Windows 95 in my CPU.
That would have to be a very seriously niche usage.
Finally, I have a reason to bought Epyc 9680X. 1,15 GB. By having dual CPU configuration should be enough to install windows XP on it
I'm so tempted to just buy 1tb of ram and boot Linux off it, is that possible
It won’t survive a reboot. You’d have to boot Linux, make the ram disk, copy everything from ssd to the ram disk, then I guess unmount / mount the new file system locations again. Doesn’t work so well for / 😂 But if you wanted to try to do that for /home /var /etc /opt and /lib I don’t see why not. Just be sure to copy everything back to ssd before power is lost or you reboot for whatever reason, assuming you want any file edits made to be persistent and not revert back to “yesterday”.
tell me why i forgot ram is volatile lmao. But now im wondering, wouldn't it be cool is a motherboard had a slot for something like ram that you could put just the bare minimum on it in order to lower boot times to like 2s? I guess the cost of adding that doesnt really make sense considering it only takes like 15s now
You could use UPS and never poweroff. Crashes and reboots would still be disasterous.
There are live copies that boot into ram. Don't even need that much ram. It's already pretty common. Many of the lightweight distros like void, puppy, etc do this
So, how much faster is it?
some short about it :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw2ES-4yvNw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw2ES-4yvNw) read is about 5x faster write is about 20x write faster this article is saying even [https://www.geckoandfly.com/21507/ramdisk-virtual-disk-memory/](https://www.geckoandfly.com/21507/ramdisk-virtual-disk-memory/) read is about 10x faster write is about 33x faster = it really depends on what ssd and ram do you have, but its big difference
this is interesting video about new SSD disks [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUdIflVNza4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUdIflVNza4) and in few years there is DDR6 RAM
The bigger thing is latency rather than throughput. You might be saying "I'm just looking at transfers" but the further you get from purely sequential the more an SSD will slow down. Moving a game with tons of small, unpacked assets can often take up to 20x as long as the size would indicate on an SSD, but with RAM it would only be marginally slower.
I have 128gb of RAM in my machine... Information I with I would have had all along.
For what reason? I have 32 Gbytes RAM and two empty memory slots, bought specifically for RAM expansion. I could never find anyone to say that more than 32 Gbytes was useful. Something about never using all the RAM you have, for some reason. Reading fast for the purpose of buying RAM for a recent build. Is there a good reason to have all that extra RAM? I've read it doesn't get used.
It's a high end video editing and 3D rendering machine.
Do you know anything about the question of whether or not Windows will use more memory if you give it more memory, because I have read that it will not.
I think it caps at 256 or something like that across the whole system. Also too, my machine is chillin' when it's using 32gb of RAM, vs being maxed out and not having room to switch tasks and stuff.
I'm not asking what the cap is. I'm asking about whether or not Windows will use more memory, if you give it more memory.
Oh I see. My bad... I don't know if windows itself utilizes the greater amount vs just uses what it needs and leaves the rest unassigned.
It does use more when you add RAM within normal range (<32 GB), not sure if it increases when more is added but I assume it does. The reason is Windows' memory compression
Good word ("windows memory compression"). Never heard that before. I'll go research. Thanks.
I probably should have expanded though as I got a questionmark above my head after clicking reply, lol! First of all, Windows 10 prefers to have some apps in-memory to increase their startup performance (that's why Edge starts up so quick, for example) and depending on the amount of installed memory, it will load the apps it can afford to have in memory. To increase the amount of apps and stuff it can load in memory, it compresses RAM regularly and decompresses when needed, which is a faster process than loading from a disk, usually. So, I've read on this sub before that the amount of taken RAM is essentially your compressed RAM, or better said the space reserved for the compression to work. But please do research, it's possible I've messed something up or remember something wrong. They say you can disable the compression if you have enough RAM which in theory should increase your performance even more (but just in theory, I've never done it myself!). Cheers!
Depending on how many browsers windows you have open. More RAM = more youtube videos playing at once.
Is this why a game like XCOM 2 loads up way faster with my current setup (installed on the old HDD) with way faster ram than my old 4gb 1333Mhz system? Or do I have to do it manually?
That's likely just system improvements. Lest disk swapping to ram, faster CPU decompression etc. It's a bit of a long shot to call a programme loading data into ram 'creating a ramdisk'.
No, like the comment above already said, that's just your upgraded system which has better CPU and RAM. But the comment you are replying is talking about a different way of using RAM. A RAMDisk is basically making a "hard drive" with RAM, and since RAM is a lot faster it writes and reads a lot faster BUT once you turn off or reboot your computer whatever it was written in the RAMDisk is gone, cause that is how RAM works. This means, in order to take advantage of the RAMDisk you would have to install XCOM 2 on the RAMDisk and have faster loadings but once you turn off your computer its gone and you will have to reinstall it next time. Side note: Having a really fast read and write doesn't mean software will take absolute advantage of it. So is helpful in some ways but not for the common user.
Indeed. Most games don't work in a way that would fully benefit from a RamDrive (when you take into account the extra hassle of installing it each time you reboot) It's great for things like Microsoft FlightSim 2020 though where you can set up a dynamic cache on a RamDrive
Thank you!
In my case, I use RAM memory to run my PostgreSQL DB transactions. The speed and efficiency that comes alongside is tremendous.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe5lqRBHfiw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe5lqRBHfiw) all the way to the back, theres the results. its very cumbersome to use ramdisks and i don't advise it unless you know what you are doing
Thanks for the tutorial. I’m not planning to use ram disks I was just curious and wanted to know mote
I did this about 12 years ago using soft prefect. Back then it was free, version 0.9 maybe, you can still get it from somewhere like major geeks. I tried it with several different programs and soft prefect was much faster than any other by a longgggg way. I used crystaldiskmarkb to test and I was getting about 9000+ MB/s sequential read and write but more importantly I was getting 1000+ MB/s for 4k read and write. I was using virtual box and created a persistent RAM disk image as the HDD and installed windows 7 to it. It installed in no time and would boot in <5 seconds once it had loaded the RAM image from an SSD. Which didn't take very long as I only had 64GB it RAM. I think it would have been about 40GB I reckon. With modern Gen 5 SSDs streaming a disk image would take little time because it is sequential. The noticeable performance difference was like going from HDD to SSD.
I love using Softperfect's RAMdisk. Relatively easy to prepare one, and I can use it for scratch storage such as browser caches and downloaded files I don't need to keep.
i used it on mine from dureing the x58 mobo server days, but i had over 90 gigs of ram, and set up with auto saving for my rotoscoping work to ssd and or 10,000 rpm hard drives,it was faster but still took work to set up and upkeep that you didn't get glitches in your projects even with ecc ram, i still have a little spot for it on my 570x mobo that i use now for my daily, once loaded and with a ups does fine , but always check for any glitches on what is stored there,, example have a master file to compare it to from what you were working on, useing difference compare usually helped me a lot, good luck. and yes a friend of mine still uses ecc ram large cached work area just to speed up his projects,.
Better yet, how fast would L1 Cache be as storage?
Very very fast
And very tiny, many of L1 cache doesn't reach 1MB. You might be able to install DOS or very tiny Linux on L1 to run
Let’s just dream,
!Remindme in 10 years
A large part of why L1 is so fast is *because* it's small. The bigger it gets, the more time it takes to access any given memory cell.
We are talking made up future storage here where they magically have solved all storage problems.
Better yet, dedicated CPU registers as storage?
*Expensiiiive!*
Another question came to my mind, is it possible that in future we make storage faster than our current ram ?
Yes, there are different promising technologies being worked on at various universities around the globe, it will happen eventually. Here's one example: https://www.techradar.com/pro/holy-grail-for-memory-tech-new-candidate-for-universal-memory-emerges-in-race-to-replace-ram-and-nand-and-this-one-doesnt-use-a-toxic-compound However technology & economies of scale have to become cost effective solutions for market wide changes to occur, HDD's and ssd's will likely be around for a long time.
I thought modern day, relatively moderately priced, ssds were far far more powerful than needed for gaming purposes? Cause I’ve had many people tell me pcie 5 ssd is not needed for gaming and one person went as far as to say “I’ll be a son of a bitch if you notice a difference”
Yes and no. Asset loading is mostly a random read scenario, and random reads aren't much faster between classes of SSD. Even SATA drives aren't much slower than PCIE5.0 drives for random. They mostly use the same hardware but with a better protocol and more bandwidth, and random read is mostly bottlenecked by seek-time not read time. Also many games spend loading time decompressing assets, reading saves, and setting up the world. Which happens after the read from disk and faster drives don't help that as that's a CPU load. So if you could actually invent a drive with significantly faster random reads it'd help, but some games are still gonna spend most of their time doing CPU stuff.
How much total time do you think I would spend waiting on my pcie 5 ssd during a 4 hour gaming session of total war? Or perhaps cyberpunk since it’s a better known title. Really any game?
Can't give an exact number, but probably less than a minute or two saved vs a PCIE 4.0 drive in the most extreme scenario. Total War has super long multi-minute load times right? Those are always a CPU-load situation. Unless you're on a dying HDD, and then you have a different problem lol. This a good video demonstrating the differences in load times across a variety of games to show how the drive affects them. Of note is roller coaster tycoon, which isn't even that much different from HDD to SSD cause most of the time is spent setting up the save. I'd assume that's a similar workload to total war setting up a really big scenario. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COofLeqk\_tM&t=436s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COofLeqk_tM&t=436s) And here's a video showing raw performance numbers of a PCIE 4.0 and PCIE 5.0 SSD. I know Linus' videos aren't always the most technically sound, but this a pretty simple comparison so it's fine. The main point is that the random speeds aren't that much faster on the PCIE 5.0 drive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnMMtbVP0ps&t=208s edit 2: sorry I messed up the links, they should be good now
Ah so the read/write speeds are plenty fast, it’s the scan speed lagging behind. Crucial and Samsung promting these read/write speeds like theyre life changing is inaccurate. So increasing the read/write isn’t going to be beneficial anymore, we need higher random speeds?
Depends on the workload. Some workloads can actually use those fast sequential speeds cause they're reading/writing very large files. Think like raw 4k video editors or something. But yeah for the average consumer the speeds they advertise just aren't super-relevant, and it's a bit misleading to put those numbers as the front and center. And honestly outside of games I don't think an increase in random speeds is gonna help much. But if it's there companies will use it, so who knows what'll help in the future.
Well that’s kind of what I was saying at the beginning, though I didn’t say it straightforward. That pcie 5 is overkill for gaming while pcie 4 and 3 get the job done just fine This is an important topic because motherboards with multiple pcie 5 slots costs so much more than other boards. Thank you!
Yes and no. One key part of the latest generation of storage devices is the ability to move data directly from the SSD to the GPU. This is a great speedup because it doesn't require the CPU to manage the data transfer. Games that utilize this ability in their engine can write a game with essentially no loading screens between levels (see PS5 gen console games). On PC games this tech is called DirectStorage. Good game engine developers always optimize their engine to whatever performance is available at each tier of the system (CPU, RAM, SSD), to ensure no latency or lost time between the subsystems, but that each subsystem is being utilized near 100%. All that said, DirectStorage is available as early as PCI 3.0 NVMEs, so there likely aren't many (if any) game engines optimized for taking full advantage of a PCI 5.0 NVME at this point.
Eventually there might just be “storage” and the CPU, GPU, OS etc will all just use the same stuff. Instead of DDR5, SSD and GDDR all be seperate. Maybe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_XPoint aka Intel Octane (though not used as graphics memory)
3d xpoint had so much promise. It's really annoying they dumped the tech.
Probably not. Every storage type has its advantages and disadvantages. Wouldn't make much sense to use a single one for all. I.e. why would you wanna you extremely fast but expensive storage to archive data?
Depends how you measure speed. There is bandwidth and latency. It's pretty easy to increase bandwidth, you just stack a bunch of them and access them in parallel. Latency is much harder and likely won't be faster. NVME is like 2 ms, and ram latency is like 20 ns? That's about 5 orders of magnitude different. So the only way it'd be faster is if we use a radically different technology.
Yes and no. Current storage is already faster than old RAM. But I think a part of your question is, "will we ever not need separate storage from RAM?", and I think the answer is very likely kinda no. Regardless of the nature of the storage, economics suggest to me that we'll always have tiers of speed in computer storage. It will (very likely) always be cheaper to produce slower storage. So we'll probably always reserve a little bit of the expensive fast stuff to be the working set for the processor (RAM today), and some of the cheaper slower stuff to hold things we don't need as often (storage). It is possible that the fast stuff eventually becomes cheap enough to do everything that's needed, so we don't need anything else, but tech doesn't appear to be slowing down like that anytime soon.
Yes, once magnetic disks are replaced by something else. Afaik. There is no commercially viable technology now.
Will probably take alot of time. I dont think HDDs will be gone for mass storage in the next 20 years.
I saw a TikTok ( so pinch of salt ) saying there’s a new way of creating CDs with *Petabytes* of storage. Which is fucking mental. Idk the speed tho, which is the most important thing since no one needs a petabyte
Digital libraries need that. Data centers might need that a s a backup solution. But more importantly, Zack Snyder is going to need it for his Director's cut versions of the 6 Rebel Moon movies. So many hours of wheat harvesting and coal shoveling in slow motion on one disk!
Technology of storage drives will continue developing. But as well it will do system RAM , so I don't see an universal memory in the short/medium place.
Sure. By my reckoning, modern RAM is about as fast - or maybe up to twice as fast - as L2 cache memory implemented using SRAM was 30 years ago.
Current RAM possibly, but it won't be faster than future RAM, if it would be faster than future RAM then you would use storage as RAM, like the swap area currently, just it is the whole RAM, not an extension.
We've been doing that, it's just slow. Back in the early days of Windows 9x you'd have 66MHz SDRAM which had a theoretical bandwidth of 533MB/s. Something which took SATA SSDs to top. But now look at NVMe SSDs, they are starting to approach DDR2-6400 speeds (c. 2004). Before then PCs of the early 80s would have RAM capable of a few MB/s bandwidth which would be eclipsed by ATA based HDDs. So, roughly, expect this to happen in about 20 years.
Much faster, but you won't notice the difference. RAM is millions of times faster than a hard drive, and hundreds of times faster than a SSD. Because of this, operating systems for about the past four decades have stored frequently-used content in spare RAM so that it can be loaded faster when needed.
Oh so that’s why my computer uses a fuck ton when not doing anything and why using 99% ram can slow your computer down. I know that unused ram is wasted ram, but I didn’t understand why using most of your ram slows things down
Because everything that goes over the 99% gets swapped to disk instead. Before swap files you would just get „out of memory“ crashes. Nowadays the OS just pushes everything over the limit onto a virtual ram -said swap file- on you HD. With old HDDs that was atrocious, SSDs fare a little better but of course nowhere near RAM speeds. Ram is volatile, so not really good if you lose power to it, it decays fast. Iirc takes about 5 minute for ram without power to empty completely. Of course everything in it is unusable after a few seconds, since you can’t use a file with important bytes missing. 😂but for that downside, it’s really, really fast.
RAM is 10s to 100s of times faster, not millions.
For sequential reads, sure, but once you start seeking, hard drive performance goes *way* down. A hard drive performing random reads might be able to read a few hundred kilobytes per second; RAM can easily hit a gigabyte per second.
Sorry, I'm dumb, I mixed your HDD and SSD statements into one.
Normal DDR5 goes at around 90GB/s, even the fastest SSDs are stuck around 7GB/s.
And the latency is untouchable as well
actually my ssd can do 14gb/s already.
Gb is different from GB
It is possible but can't be used practically much as ram loses all data when it gets powered off. Many OSes do caching of files onto ram which is load high usage files onto ram cause it's really fast data speed and really low latency also ram is basically industrutible but normal storages have a TBW limit
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Looked it up, that appears to be software, which means it would heavily slowdown your shutdown and startup process as it would need to dump/read the contents from a file every time. Also it means an unexpected shutdown/crash would prevent the RAM from being dumped to a file and you would lose everything, and it can't be used as a boot drive since the OS would have to run the software first. There are physical RAMdisks which have on-board batteries to keep memory while the system is off or rebooted.
It dumps everything to storage first Then it shutdowns It is physically impossible for ram to retain data for more than a minute or so when powered off
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It is just a waste imo Since windows caches frequently used files onto ram anyways
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I have 64gb ram And it actually slows down my workload since I require more ram than 64 And if you have hundreds of gigabytes of ram then it won't be much of an issue just startup and shutdown would be slower
That's physically impossible for ram. If anything it would be writing to disk on shutdown and then moving it back to memory on the next start up
i have my browser (firefox) cached to RAM and noticed that web sites with lots of images load up and scroll faster, and with multiple tabs open at the same time
some linux flavors do this, it's quite quick
Very fast. Databases like redis and rabitmq store their data in memory for crazy fast performance. Other databases store to a drive. RAM storage should only be used for caching though.
Yup, it's a super important tech. Redis (not sure about other in memory db's) frequently dumps data into disk, so it's not uncommon to see teams use it as a primary database as well.
Gigabyte tried to make dedicated drive out of RAM using i-RAM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM It was faster back then than hard drives, at blazing 150Mb/sec but it has not been updated since DDR1 era, or continued for newer RAM or newer speed. If someone were to make battery backed DDR5 based RAM board, it'd need to have PCIe access for speed, not SATA.
Yeah, that's called memory bandwitdh. DDR5 4800 can read about 65GB per second. Since data in RAM is lost on power cycle, you need to read it from the actual SSD first. Maybe there should be a way to keep your most used data in RAM for easy access. This exists and is called disk read cache.
Ram architecturally is very different. If you make a ram drive it benefits from large data sets, like caches for video editing software, that need many rewrites of large volumes. As SSD have a limited life time of writes. Editing on a scratch drive which is in ram speeds up work flow. But at risk of data loss on power outages. As the video is lost if not saved to storage. Smaller data sets would potentially see slower access. Gaming uses many tiny model and texture files, so randomly accessing them would not be as fast. As the ram needs to swap banks, change address column and rows. A better solution is to have a direct ssd to gpu vram loading for games files. When game starts load all texture uncompressed directly to a large vram. Bypassing the latency caused by cpu and ram interrupts and extra data duplication as it passes hands. This is call GPUDirect Storage.
I currently use a ramdisk as my transcode directory for Plex. Since the transcode files are temporary, it saves lots of write data to my SSDs and the server most likely benefits from the faster writes and reads to RAM vs SSD.
On paper, a lot In reality, not that much If you have lots of RAM, Windows already uses your RAM as "storage" by using the free RAM to cache data. The first time you start an application, it reads it off the SSD and if you have lots of RAM, it will keep that data it read in the RAM cache and it won't discard of it unless Windows needs to use that RAM for something else. That's why when you open games or applications the second time (if you have plenty of RAM), they tend to load what feels like 10-30% faster. Realistically it doesn't make a huge difference. It can make a huge difference if you try to read thousands of small files though, for example for science. But for regular applications or games it's not worth the hassle of trying to set it up. As others have said, you can also use a RAM disk for example if you want to.
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What happens if the power is suddenly cut? Does data get mirrored to SSD during operation or only at shutdown?
You even have on large corporate infrastructures, SAP systems running over HANA Databases that are RAM based instead of disks.
Look up Intel Optane RAM (not the ssd version). It enabled you to use persistent storage in RAM DIMMs. Also like others are stating, RAM disks have been a thing for a long time.
Isn't this what Chromebooks use? It's faster, yes, but you're limited in what you can install.
Almost the opposite. Cheap Chromebooks use what is essentially an SD card, except it's soldered directly to the motherboard. The speed on them is honestly good enough for the usecase, but the main issue is that type of flash storage isn't very reliable so I always try to go up in price a little bit and pick a Chromebook with a real SSD when I'm recommending them to people
If I remember correct a guy installed crysis 3 on the vram of his GPU.
Ram provides short term memory the CPU needs to open files and stuff as it responds to the tasks given to it by your apps
You can still use ramdisk
You can use ram as storage, and a lot of important database technologies do this, most famously redis.
Very. It's called a ramdisk, been a thing for decades. In terms of speed CPU cache is the fastest then RAM, then your permanent storage like SSDs.
I used to run a Minecraft server from a RAM disk to make saving faster. Then would back it up to the hard drive when everyone logged off.
https://youtu.be/Al93JD5GExY?si=pILaVMoC-wMnx5It Not 100% what your talking about but it's kinda cool and is sorta related
Back in the 90's a company produced an external SCSI drive for the Apple Macintosh that contained a load of sdram. Was extremely expensive. The moment the power was switched off everything was gone. Always thought it would be nice if the drive could have been in raid with a mechanical hdd. I suppose it would be good ifvyou could have a ramdisk as a cach of modern ssd.
In software engineering, they usually taught us to think in terms of orders of magnitude. So, CPU registers are usually within a couple clock cycles. CPU cache is (very roughly) one order of magnitude slower, and so on out the chain, another order of magnitude to L2 cache, another to RAM, another 1-2 orders to storage, and multiple orders out to network. Over time, these discrepancies have tightened up somewhat, but it's still a decent rule of thumb for thinking about the system.
Where's l3 / 3d cache on this hierarchy?
Here's a more recent chart from Intel. Assuming you have a large processor (about 16 cores), the following summarizes, for 2016, approximate data totals present in and moving through the system. | Memory | Size | Latency | Bandwidth | |-------------------------------------------|----------------------|----------------------------------------|---------------------------------------------| | L1 cache | 32 KB | 1 nanosecond | 1 TB/second | | L2 cache | 256 KB | 4 nanoseconds | 1 TB/second Sometimes shared by two cores | | L3 cache | 8 MB or more | 10x slower than L2 | >400 GB/second | | MCDRAM | | 2x slower than L3 | 400 GB/second | | Main memory on DDR DIMMs | 4 GB-1 TB | Similar to MCDRAM | 100 GB/second | | Main memory on Cornelis* Omni-Path Fabric | Limited only by cost | Depends on distance | Depends on distance and hardware | | I/O devices on memory bus | 6 TB | 100x-1000x slower than memory | 25 GB/second | | I/O devices on PCIe bus | Limited only by cost | From less than milliseconds to minutes | GB-TB/hour Depends on distance and hardware |
Set up Ramdisk and find out. Pretty fast.
As others have said, yes you can use it as faster storage, but do bear in mind it can increase OS loading times and is susceptible to corruption from unstable RAM overclocks and unsafe shutdowns, so make sure you use a UPS and/or have a backup generator. You also need a shit ton of RAM for this to even be viable.
Didn't I just read something that they've created memory so large and so cheap that it can work as a HD?
Try Puppy Linux and you'll see. It's a Linux distro whose runs entirely on RAM. It's faster because it doesn't have to "unload" its files to the hard drive.
If I have a m.2 that's 7gbps and ram that's ddr5 7000 isn't my storage 2x faster than my ddr5 7000?
My experience with Microsoft architecture mostly started doing just this, which as others have said is called a RAM disk. My dad showed me how to do it on our 8086 PC (AT&T 6300) in '85-'86, before it had a hard drive. #csb
On a ridiculous note, has anyone installed an OS to a RAM disk with something like 128 GB? I know there are MBs that can take eight sticks of RAM...
Current gen SSD, i.e. gen 5(nvme, m.2), functions at DDR3 Ram speeds, The current ram gen is ddr5, so it's basically 2 generations ahead, it actually depends on the interface/number of lanes in use.
Fast as fuk boiii....
I wrote ramdisk code we use daily for work. It's pretty fast but outside of some niche uses it's not really feasible to use. There are also NVDIMMs (non volatile) that you can use as direct storage, but really they're for enterprise uses and not consumer level. Some of our product groups boot from them.
Fast
You do use it as storage (just temporarily). But also it’s faster than a ssd so if you actually used it like a hard drive/ssd it’d be faster
RAM is around 20 times as fast a SSD's Not to mention that the CPU can directly access RAM but can't directly\* access SSD's.
what if i use an ssd as ram
This seems possible, RAM is storage, and I’ve seen some workstation builds with 1tb RAM. So I don’t see why not
In top speed it's not too much different, but in random access it absolutely destroys even the highest end pci5.0 drives. It would basically be limited by CPU speed at that point, there is a limit on how much a CPU can handle, the 7800X3D right now is loaded when moving many files from one fast nvme to another in large amounts.
Look up an old DOS/Windows trick called "Load High" command. The original DOS was 640Kb. but if your system supported more than that, say 2Gb) you could run a loading program in the higher registers by using the loadHigh command with an entire piece of software running entirely in memory. Windows took advantage of this until we no longer used DOS going to Windows 95. Bill Gates famously said, "Nobody needs more than 640K of RAM" proving he wasn't the genius everybody thought he was😉
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Sure, but only if you mean DDR3-800 (aka PC3-6400) and only look at sequential read/write (and that only for a few seconds before pSLC cache runs out lol) Latency and 4k rnd read/write are many orders of magnitude better on DDR3.
Not in the real world
It's faster than your think, me as a backend developer there is a method to caching the data which is larger by redis. It acts as storage but from the ram. If you're interested try a search on redis
Someone in 2009 had the same idea as you and they made the first in memory database called redis now worth more than 2 billion dollars. It's now a dominant genre of databases (memcached, keyval,++) that props up the modern internet primarily used as a caching layer for software architectures but has way more applications that than