What is RAM-disk?

Perhaps now it is difficult to find a person who would be satisfied with the performance of your computer. And it does not matter at all for what tasks it is used - games, encoding video streams or trivial typing in office applications. One of the opportunities to increase the speed of the system is to organize the so-called RAM-disk in the memory cells of the computer. Of course, this operation is not a panacea that guarantees the solution of all problems with the performance of the computer, but, nevertheless, in any case makes the system more "responsive". The increase in the speed of work can range from several percent to multiple acceleration. It all depends on the applications used.

Theory

Many people know the computer term "bottleneck". Its meaning is that the performance of the entire system is determined by the speed of the lowest-speed device. Thus, the throughput of CPUs, video cards, data buses has long been calculated in gigabytes per second, but hard drives can only transmit up to hundreds of megabytes, and then at best. Thus, a computer equipped with even the most modern video card, multichannel memory, a multi-core processor, will still wait for loading application data from the hard disk. This phenomenon is typical for a water-filled bottle - regardless of volume, the rate of flow will be determined by the diameter of the neck.

The reason for this low performance of HDDs is the use of rotating mechanical parts in their design. New interfaces do not solve the problem, since they optimize only the electronic part, leaving mechanics unchanged. However, since the days of DOS, there is a way to partially circumvent this limitation - it's RAM-disk. Its meaning is quite simple: from the available amount of RAM, any part of it is programatically allocated, which the operating system "sees" as a standard disk. Since the performance of memory chips is much higher than the transfer of data by the hard drive, then placing in this RAM-disk Information, you can work with it many times faster. The only drawback of this solution is the loss of all files stored on such a disk when the power is turned off. After all, RAM is an energy dependent memory.

Alternative

Recognizing this shortcoming, several compromise solutions have been proposed. So, a decade ago, special expansion cards appeared on the market that plug into the standard PCI slot. They were a memory chip, a bus controller and a battery, located on a single PCB board. Although due to the limitations of PCI such solutions could not be compared with the performance of RAM-disk, created in the usual RAM, they were faster than hard disks. Alas, they did not receive special distribution. Most users still used the classic RAM-disk - WinXP even allowed to automate the creation of such a pseudo disk.

After the advent of solid-state memory technology and the emergence of devices based on it, the aforementioned boards were finally forgotten. SSDs are completely electronic solutions, so their speed is an order of magnitude higher than that of traditional hard drives. To disadvantages for now can be attributed the high cost of gigabytes of space and a relatively small amount.