What To Know About RAM Drives and How It Works

With SSD storage becoming cheaper every day, fast and abundant storage is accessible for the modern computer user. Most new computers come with pre-installed SSDs, and ultrabooks rely almost exclusively on solid-state storage. But what if you want to go ... even faster?

RAM Drives: We Don’t Need Roads

A RAM drive is a kind of software abstraction of a disk drive. He tells his team to handle a couple of RAM sticks, a hard drive, and compliments nicely. By reusing the RAM, you get a great boost in speed, but not without drawbacks.

RAM drives launch a defining characteristic of disk drives, which is the permanent storage of data. Like volatile memory, RAM is erased every time power is lost, but it makes up for it by being fast and agile. Hard drives and solid state drives are heavy, even megafauna in comparison, but can store large amounts of data at low cost and without the need for power.

The dichotomy of fast, RAM and temporary storage slow and permanent recording has been around for decades, but RAM drives have it all. After all, if we can put a man on the moon, why can not we make RAM hard drive?

Lead cost of RAM has also contributed to increased RAM. The amount of RAM we take for granted on our computers would embarrass your grandfather. While we again see a rise in prices is still in the field of the affordable to set up a 64GB disk of dazzling fast silicon. However, it is still extremely expensive compared to platinum or SSD hard drives.

Temporary, but Fast

Since RAM drives can store data that when fed with all the data you want to keep must be transferred. This means that RAM drives must have the data loaded on them at startup, copying information from a primary storage medium, such as an SSD. If you have already copied gigabytes of information, you know it takes time.

This is why using a RAM drive as a normal hard drive is heavy. The time you can save in the treatment is reduced by the time it takes to load the data into the RAM. This leads to high start-up costs, but this investment recovers in the form of ridiculous speed.

Where sequential read speeds on a high-end SSD could max out 500 MB / s, a RAM drive can easily break 5.000 MB / s and head over.

Use Cases

While speed for speed is all good and good, what possible RAM application units can be very suitable for? In which case does the user benefit significantly from the paradigm of long initialization / fast storage / temporary process of a RAM drive?

As you can guess, highly technical computing tasks are well suited to the particular nature of RAM units. 3D rendering of video, which is the poster child's desire for more resources than they ever could have, greatly benefits from faster storage. The more data you can put in a car faster, the faster you can go coding. Scientific computing can also benefit, but it is a delicate niche that meets the RAM units. The ideal user has exponentially faster file storage, but does not care much if the data is deleted.

This is the reason for most commercial applications of battery-backed RAM drives. This data allows the data to be copied to the permanent storage in case of power failure. These devices are, you guessed it, an exorbitant cost. They are mainly used for applications where high performance is critical and budget available for luxury equipment such as data centers.

conclusion

RAM drives are faster than all get-out, but their applications are very specific. It is not very difficult to push in the traditional sense. Rather, they are extremely fast temporary storage media that can be treated as a hard drive by your operating system. While RAM disks are not very useful to consumers, technical users can see a big boost.