What to do with a RAMdisk?

Burning Eclipse

So my new PC should be up and running by this time next week - all going well with delivery. I went for 16GB RAM because it was going cheap, and I figured why not? I'll be using the system almost exclusively for gaming, so 8GB is the sweet-spot there. I'd love to get input from some of the more knowledgeable members here on what would be a good use for 8GB of a RAMdisk?

Khannie

Ramdisks have their uses, but they're rare. Generally better to let the OS use the unused RAM for caching purposes. It will still report it as free, but the kernel should actively use it for caching things that you've accessed before.

invaderzimirl

there is something ive been wanting to play with for a while, where you can create a ramdisk and load an image (for lack of a better word) into it of the OS (stripped down to fit in the 8GB ram disk) and on shutdown save your active ramdisk to storage, i was thinking of doing this years ago before SSD's but you have reminded me i want to see if i can do this and check speeds from there

unkel

I use a ramdisk to write my browsers (Opera) cache to, instead of the default, which is writing it to the hard disk

If your hard disk is conventional, it will speed your browsing experience up dramatically, particularly if you use rich content

If your hard disk is an SSD, the speed increase is not as big, but the wear (damage) to your SSD is a lot less and your SSD should last a lot longer if you are using your web browser a lot

You only need a small size ram disk, 1GB out of your 16GB is more than enough

Burning Eclipse

Thanks for the input everyone, it's much appreciated HDD in the system is a 7200rpm old beast so there are certainly gains to be had. If I had SSD in the system, I'd likely give the RAMdisk a miss.

Capt'n Midnight

turn OFF your swap file, so the OS isn't ever tempted to write to the hard drive