The problem with RAMdisks on Premiere or After Effects is that it has to be set up before launching the programs, so it's a pain. You have to create the RAMdisk, then launch PPro or AE, assign it as the scratch, and then relaunch. If you reboot, that ramdisk is gone, right? Then you have to remake it before you relaunch PPro or AE, otherwise it will say "I don't have the scratch disk, so I'm going to use space on your C: drive / home directory." (in so many words)

I considered it, but I shut down every night, and don't feel like going through all that every day. I have a nice little script that makes ramdisk creation that much easier, but just couldn't be bothered, since my RAID works pretty well already. I would love to hear your experiences if you try it. I might use one myself, if it makes a difference.

"If you reboot, that ramdisk is gone, right?"

WRONG. Will work perfectly as a extra HDD. only 30 times faster

Allready tested...

Great, so you edit in Premiere and After Effects using a RAM disk, and no problems? Guess I'll try it myself. I only have 32GB, so I'll only make a 2GB RAM disk, saving 24GB for Adobe and 6GB for other processes.

Cristo,

Good luck with the new build and testing; I'm looking forwards to your findings!

Regarding how I "tested" with a RAMDISK, it was by running PPBM5 multiple times using different configurations. For example, set up the RAMDISK and assign media cache and media cache DB to it, etc.

Realize too that I am using big, fast arrays already, and only had 24GB of total RAM to play with. On a 48GB system, things could have turned out very differently - my RAMDISK was about 10GB in size, whereas 48GB of RAM would have allowed for a 34GB RAMDISK partition. Bill Gehrke here told me about the program I used; it is called RAMdisk by Dataram.

Cheers,

Jim

@ the moment for me the super cache "RAM CACHE" is showing more cool. I leet you the link so you can try it as well and look the pic above.

http://www.superspeed.com/download/trialversions.php



Cheers

Cristobal

Well I squeezed the RAMdisk test in and could not find any improvement over the the testing of PPBM5.5 with 32 GB of RAM.  With the RAMdisk software set to allocate 14 GB to the RAMdisk and the remaining 18 GB used as regular RAM I got statistically the same results as I got running the test with 3 each 1 TB 7200 rpm drives in RAID 0.  Why did I use three drives?  My drives are the older 7200.12 Seagate drives so I wanted to emulate two of the newer ones when they again become cost effective.  The newer 1 TB/platter 64 MB cache Seagate drives are much faster but until hard drive get back to "normal" I have to improvise.

Cristo,

Simply incredible!!! That is fantastic and quite interesting news indeed; and with a lowly GTX 275 no less .

Did you use any hard drives?

Was it CS5 or CS5.5?

Regards,

Jim

Looks very interesting,

please foward further information once you have done more tests.

Why would you need it?

I agree Ram is faster than SSD. But the cache / scratch or what ever will be used only once the RAM fills in any program. So when the system can automatically do the task why are you willing taking additional difficulties for same objective in different path? That's why no consumer os manufactures doesn't provide any utilities like this.

If you feel the need of scratch / cache Install more Ram. There is no point doing this kind of Ram disk Drive for caching purpose. It is like taking the half of the avilable cache and keep it to acces in diffrent way.

I will say the only need for Ram disk will be when ever you want to prolong the life time of SSD by routing the temp files on it. But i thing nowadays even that might not worth doing since SSD prices are falling

If i am wrong in some thing educate me

Bill, are you sure for this?

I am using supercache with a ram disk of 18 gb and PPBM fails with sheep sound on disk test.

I have realized that ram is saturated by this test and i can't beat Cristobal PPBM5 result with "only" 32 gb installed on my system! :-)

Bill said:

Jim, I also found the 24 GB old limitation that RAMDisk was not much help. Now that I have a 32 GB machine I guess I will have to try that but it will not be until after Christmas. With 32 GB I can set a 14 GB RAMdisk (enough to hold all of the PPBM project and results) and get some data. By the way just going from 16 GB to 32 GB improved my PPBM5.5 scpore by more than 5 seconds.