Use of RamDisk and for what purpose?

[Riotubes]

For apps such as autocad, illustrator, photoshop and sketchup, any experiences or opinions about using RamDisk for scratch files, and if so, what size RamDisk are you using? Thanks for the input!

[alias_marks]

Not sure if this is what you mean by 'RamDisk' but a while back I had to deal with 100mb + sketchup files. They were a beast to open up and modify.

 

The IT guy at the firm I was at partitioned part of the Ram as a hard drive and then we copied the sketchup file there and opened. It was much easier to work with and faster to manipulate/save. Probably in the range of 30-40% improvement.

 

Only down side was you had to make sure you copied everything over from the Ram drive at the end of the day before shutting down, Otherwise bye bye all files on the ram disk on restart.

[Riotubes]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, that is what I mean by 'RamDisk'. Some of these products now have features that 'save' the work (scratch file) by first imaging the drive upon shutdown and reloading upon reboot. The only downside is that it does slow down shutdown and boot times a bit. I've also read that recent offerings can automatically rationalize RAM across system and RamDisk as needed. It would seems these features would alleviate some hesitation about using RamDisk for this purpose. I'm toying with experimenting with it but wanted to hear others' experiences. Thanks!

[AJLynn]

Also don't forget that ramdisks are volatile - a system crash or power loss wipes a ramdisk but not a hard disk. Make sure you only save to hard disks!

[Jeff Mottle]

I looked into RAMdisk software about a year or so ago and in the end opted to just get an SSD. Not quite as fast, but a lot more reliable and still significantly faster than a network or mechanical drive.