Posted by AlecStaar
Take a read, long, but might answer a few of your questions etc.:
"I've seen utilities that allow you to section off some of your RAM and turn it into a drive letter."
I wrote one of the first ones out there back in 1996 in "APK RamDisk 4.0++" in fact, lol! Based off the Microsoft DDK Ramdisk.sys driver...
"This means it's volatile (erases when the computers turns off), but for a page file (swap file), would not this be a great idea??? Have your swap file, say 512MB, in super fast RAM???"
I do something like that here, & that is to use a CENATEK "RocketDrive" (a ramdisk on a dedicated board with 2gb of PC-133 SDRAM RAM on it that the system recognizes as another harddisk off a RAID controller).
Works... VERY well!
The Pagefile is on 1gb of it (1/2), & temp ops, most logging (like eventlogs & app logs), + webpage caching is on the other 1gb 1/2 of it!
That card is now in my newest machine (3.2ghz P4, 512mb PC-3200 Corsair RAM, Dual WD "Raptor" 10,000rpm disks in RAID 0, & ATI Radeon 9800XT 256mb DDRAM), but, I used to use it that way in my last system also!
I am SURE it makes a diff. doing it the way I do using a solid-state hardware + driver based solution... how? I've seen it in motion!
Well, read on:
Example - I recently gave my older system to my Mom (who is getting into the internet for email communications with us all over the country & our relatives overseas plus my brother, sister, father & I are 'scattered' all over the nation basically & it saves on phone bills (plus, you can send photos, you get the drift!)).
I ran that system (Dual Pentium III CPU's @ 1152mhz & 1gb of PC-133 SDRAM & a GeForce 4 Ti4600 128mb RAM plus my old Kodak Digital Camera DC-215 1.3mpixel type for her to use) with that ramdrive board I speak of above & it performed better with it, noticeably so in fact.
It runs without it now, you can tell the difference... it pages to disk, & is slower (tuned the same too, exactly as it was when I had it) w/out the CENATEK solid-state RamDrive board in place.
"I'm thinking of upping from 512MB to 1Gig and using half of it for a swap file."
You'd be paging RAM-to-RAM... not really worth it w/ only 1gb if you ask me, & depends on what you usually do as well!
If you had, say 4gb of RAM (or more, really... lots more like 16GB)?
Then I would say "Sure, you have a massive excess, go for it that way by using something like ArSoft's 256mb capable (maybe more, not sure, that is how far I have pushed it myself in the past) to do webpage caching, temp ops, & maybe even paging since you have that much RAM to burn!"
If you had that much? You could probably operate w/out a pagefile, but... the system & apps get paged out usually anyhow at some point... that's just how virtual memory system type Os' work anyways, you are best off with one in place, even a smallish 256mb size one!
"I'd hate to use another hard drive just for swap file. I do Video and audio work."
Ok... Like I said above "Depends on what you do"...
"Any drawbacks to this idea???"
Yes, I think so, by using system RAM & especially w/ the type of applications you are using & work you are doing!
That type of work needs memory... lots of it, if not an AthlonFX 64-bit memory addressing capable CPU as well (since I heard they excel @ that type of stuff in fact from reviews I read).
* Go for a solid-state ramdrive as I did... costs, but would be your BEST ticket for putting a paging file onto (as well as temp ops, webpages cached, logging, & more)...
APK
P.S.=> I would say do it, MAYBE, if you had 4gb of system RAM... still, I would opt for my method... I've seen it in action on a system with a CENATEK RocketDrive... & then, that same system given to my Mom without it in place doing temp ops, paging, & webpage caches + most all logging the system does too... there IS a difference in that machine now (slower) without it in place! apk