AMD Radeon RAMDisk Released

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AMD's Radeon RAMDisk software, launched along with its desktop A-Series "Trinity" APUs, is being pitched to consumers as a trial software. A combination of A-Series "Trinity" APUs and AMD-certified memory lets you use the software to create a RAMDisk which works in conjuction with the primary HDD/SSD much in the same way as Intel Smart Response tech or NVELO Dataplex, it's just that the cache SSD is replaced by the system memory, an infinitely faster and more durable caching medium. The software juggles data from the primary drive to the RAMDisk based on its heat (frequency of access). Used with DDR3-1600 MHz memory, users could see data access speeds of up to 25.6 GB/s (gigabytes per second), a 1,700-times speedup over conventional HDD. When off the trial, a license to use the software can be bought for $19.

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Source: Techpowerup

I have downloaded the trial. Its limited to 4gig because I have Corsair not the rebranded OCZ. Ram usage is currently 86% while cores are stable 1-3%. I'm going to stick with the trial and use it for a week before I commit 20 bucks.

So instead of caching the RAM memory on the HDD, it caches it in a second set of RAM??? Can we just say Redundancy department of Redundancy. Or am I just being naive?

^^^^^
Wha? Since when has anyone ever cached RAM on a hard drive?

It's taking a portion of your available RAM and creates a caching tier that it will cache data from HDD/SSD onto.

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Originally Posted by EniGmA1987

^^^^^
Wha? Since when has anyone ever cached RAM on a hard drive?

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Page file

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Originally Posted by EniGmA1987

^^^^^
Wha? Since when has anyone ever cached RAM on a hard drive?

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Edit: I just realized the absurdity of this comment. You do it everyday. Im doing it now and so are you unless you turned it off....

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Originally Posted by Kain665

It's taking a portion of your available RAM and creates a caching tier that it will cache data from HDD/SSD onto.

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Originally Posted by Kain665

Page file

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:confused: I know what page filing is. If you have enough RAM to create a RAM Disk to page file, you dont need to page file. Just turn it off...

All infos here:

http://blogs.amd.com/play/2012/10/10...adeon-ramdisk/

Just buy an SSD instead :)

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Originally Posted by Lanek

All infos here:

http://blogs.amd.com/play/2012/10/10...adeon-ramdisk/

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I found this interesting:

Test conducted in AMD Labs measuring read and write speed performance of AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk using Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.1 benchmark versus the HDD. Hard disk had sequential read speed of 72.7MB/s and write speed of 70.92MB/s versus the RAMDisk sequential read speed of 6150MB/s and write speed of 8694MB/s. Specifications: CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K RAM: 16 GB AMD Entertainment Edition Memory 1600 Mhz 8-9-8-24, Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77-VDeluxe, System: Windows 7 Ultimate Edition: HDD: Western Digital Raptor 10000 RPM 73 GB: RAMDisk: 8GB. RMD-2

Interesting. Im still a bit confused though. I mean, from what I understand it basically works as a HDD cache in the RAM. But since RAM cannot store data after it loses power (ie. shutdown) doesnt it have to be copied back into the RAM after the PC boots up? Shouldnt take long though

Im downloading it, hope it supports my Z68

Isn't this just standard ramdisk software from dataram with an AMD logo on it? I used that software for many months before. It works well, although keep in mind that the speed up you will see in games will be minimal in comparison to a decent SSD.

From a LOT of testing, the game load times were something in this realm:

From HDD - 20s
From normal SSD (like an M4 Raid0) - 9s
From fast SSD (IOdrive Raid0) - 8s
From Ramdisk - 7s

So yes, it is faster but only a little since once you switch to SSDs, the limit is your CPU speed for the most part.

If this is ramdisk software, then all it does is create a new storage space on your PC where you can place things. So, to take advantage, you usually need to put your entire game on it (and thus you need loads of RAM).

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Originally Posted by StAndrew

Edit: I just realized the absurdity of this comment. You do it everyday. Im doing it now and so are you unless you turned it off....

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keyword: caching

definition of cache: "component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster"

a pagefile is not used for speed purposes; it's used for storage purposes.

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Originally Posted by Generic user #2

keyword: caching

definition of cache: "component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster"

a pagefile is not used for speed purposes; it's used for storage purposes.

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You're splitting hairs. I still dont see why you would make a RAM disk for page file :shrug:.

Anyone that cares about RAMDisk may want to check this Thread I made in Flat Assembler Forum less than two months ago. It will give you a lot of insight and ideas of where it can be useful. It is a niche reserved for true power users, didn't saw current generation enthusiasts toying with these.
Also, if you want a freeware utility without the ridiculous low 4 GB limit, you may want to try Gavotte RAMDisk instead.

Already using Asrock XFast RAM for some time and I think is the same...

http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/

Imdisk here is a free RAMdisk. Someone has also made a guide on how to make a RAMDisk on boot/etc. So some of us may have asked the advantage of ramdisks? Well, for one, some apps crash without pagefiles for no reason, and call it placebo, I got the feeling that windows still does some sort of caching on the drive elsewhere with pagefile disabled. IMO, SSDs fixes everything.

Also, on those rare occasions where I had to burn 100 DVDs, I plug in my DVD-RW array, put the .iso image in the RAMdisk, and start burning.

I may have sung praises for RAMdisks but I haven't found a good reason to have a permanent one in my computer yet. Also, I kinda need all 16 GB on my computer.

EDIT: Oh yeah, people also uses it for browser caches as these bypasses pagefiles. As for why they didn't turn off the cache in the first place, well, chrome doesn't allow you to do that, and it seems to be faster, which is also probably placebo. For Firefox, I'm not sure but there's probably some sort of code path that sucks if cache is disabled. I'm not obsessed enough to check the caching code for firefox or chrome though.

IMO either browser got their own problems. Chrome locking up as it shoves the main thread to focus on the loading site, rather than only specify like 90% load to it. Firefox and its horrible plugin-container, and there's a bug that didn't let us disable it. Oh well. (I always got that feeling that Firefox 3.6 and the early Firefox webgl alphas were faster. Too bad, they both don't have HTML5)

Please try to ignore my browser posts as those were off-topic. My bad.

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Originally Posted by StAndrew

You're splitting hairs. I still dont see why you would make a RAM disk for page file :shrug:.

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...splitting hairs? thats the entire purpose of a cache in the first place. if its not to improve speed, what the hell is the point of L1, L2, and L3?

not sure why you're so confused...its just a ramdisk.

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Originally Posted by ice_chill

Just buy an SSD instead :)

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I think this would be much faster actually.

i use primo ramdisk ultimate myself. setup a few ram drives for at bootup for users folder, program files and common files along with temp. uses about 10GB of ram, but not all are saved. saving once adds no time to shut down, and very rarely do i reboot the computer, although it adds no noticeable time to bootup. For small apps like comodo dragon and my users folders, it was a very noticeable performance improvement.

With 32GB of ram, i still have space to put my game of choice TF2 onto a ram disk when i want to play that also. If nothing else it saves on disk writes to the SSD, especially since its faster to load ram disk images to ram from HD storage in my raid 0 then it was from the SSD, being single files in >GB sizes.

Overall its awesome, the setup i true imaged and if anything goes wrong i just restore it in 3 minutes and update my software once i get into windows, even though most is already upto date stored on ram disks for program files and users directories.

It actually made a massive difference in web browsing and youtube experience to have it all in ram.

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Originally Posted by One_Hertz

Isn't this just standard ramdisk software from dataram with an AMD logo on it?

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Yes.

/thread

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Originally Posted by Generic user #2

...splitting hairs? thats the entire purpose of a cache in the first place. if its not to improve speed, what the hell is the point of L1, L2, and L3?

not sure why you're so confused...its just a ramdisk.

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The way I read it, it was to improve page file speeds (ie, for me, cache the RAM). In my experience, if you have enough RAM to create a RAM disk for page file, just turning off Page file would be more benefitial :shrug:. I can see how installing programs on the RAM disk for quicker loading would be nice...

This program sounds similar to FancyCache. FC functions as a buffer between the cpu and hard drive system to cache data for much quicker retrieval. FC gets the same HDD bench test scores because of the efficiency of caching to physical ram. With FC, the user can specify how much ram to associate with the target HDD.

FC is only beta, freebie, as long as the beta doesn't expire. So far, when the beta expires, go to the above link & redownload the latest beta. Been using for the past 8 months. It works well. Very cool to see another software product that's similar to it. These programs make sense of having >8 G ram.

i looked into ram disks about 4 years ago when i got my first SSD to help extend its life. it was a waste of time then, and i dont see it that different now.

AMD needs to be more worried about laptops being sold with dual channel ram as the standard first. its killing their APUs.

Regarding to this...

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A combination of A-Series "Trinity" APUs and AMD-certified memory lets you use the software to create a RAMDisk which works in conjuction with the primary HDD/SSD much in the same way as Intel Smart Response tech or NVELO Dataplex, it's just that the cache SSD is replaced by the system memory, an infinitely faster and more durable caching medium. The software juggles data from the primary drive to the RAMDisk based on its heat (frequency of access).

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A RAMDisk does NOT work like that. It could possibily can, but you will need Software support (Mostly from OS side I suppose) for being able to use a RAMDisk for caching a SSD/HDD. The only thing that a RAMDisk should be able to do to be considered one is reserving RAM space then presenting it to the OS as if it was a dull storage device instead of system RAM, it doesn't need to have any specialized functionality. And considering that this Radeon RAMDisk tool is based on DataRAM, I doubt it does so, because I don't recall hearing that DataRAM was capable of adding any sort of caching layer when I was looking for a RAMDisk tool 2 months ago.

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Originally Posted by Manicdan

i looked into ram disks about 4 years ago when i got my first SSD to help extend its life. it was a waste of time then, and i dont see it that different now.

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RAMDisk were always useful for the few people that had an actual use for them. Every now and then you will hear some guy talking wonders about RAMDisk to use as Adobe applications Scratch Disk, for Browser or some other applications caching, etc. They do wonders for many of these. They're faster than a SSD, it doesn't have wear issues like an SSD do, and considering that all these fall into "temporal files" category, restarting the machine will automatically clean up everything there. Oh, and you CAN use a RAMDisk without needing to have an SSD, meaning that the potential users could be much higher (Assuming you already have lots of RAM installed).
However, what hinders RAMDisk is usually capacity. You could manage to get caching under control in a 1 GB RAMDisk, something that any actual machine could afford to do. Now, try to make a RAMDisk big enough to copy World of Warcraft or any 10 GB+ game. Either you have the capacity, or you don't, and almost everyone will fall in the second category. That means that you need a ton of investment on RAM capacity to actually make a RAMDisk big enough for gaming purposes. But considering that there is ton of people around here that spends 400 U$D per big component (CPU, GPU, Motherboard), at current prices not getting 16/32 GB of RAM is pretty stupid. Possibily many will regret not getting RAM now that is dirt cheap than if there is any other natural catastrophe that destroys a DRAM manufacturer facility that makes price skyrocket like happened with Hard Disks.

Besides, a RAMDisk allows for some interesing hacks like the one I mentioned in the link I provided in my other Post. Albeit a bit TOO late to the party, being able to use all my 4 GB of RAM in good old WXP SP3 via a PAE-based RAMDisk with minimal configuration involved isn't something to not look at, right?

another reason i use ramdisk, making custom copies of windows with rt7lite. for temp folder and iso folder. making it so i can get it done in about 15 minutes, instead of over an hour of processing.

plus using it for users/temp/application program files directories and common files, the 5-8 seconds it added at startup, results in everything loaded immediately once in windows. thats pulling it from HD raid to ramdisk instead of my SSD, lowering reads and writes from the SSD. leaving only windows on the SSD at this time. it uses 10GB of my ram, but only has to load 4GB in image files.
Makes web browsing etc super fact, installing programs from ramdisk to ramdisk is also very enjoyable :P

other day i saw 1600MHz 2x8GB corsairs at newegg.ca for $65 a pop, so its not expensive at all for 32GB of ram and i am expecting to see 16GB unbuffered dimms any time now with these prices.

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Originally Posted by StAndrew

The way I read it, it was to improve page file speeds (ie, for me, cache the RAM). In my experience, if you have enough RAM to create a RAM disk for page file, just turning off Page file would be more benefitial :shrug:. I can see how installing programs on the RAM disk for quicker loading would be nice...

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Been reading this thread with interest. Do have a few questions as am unsure of a few things. Your saying if I have plenty of ram, currently have 48GB, I can shut off my page file and Win7 will force the page file to my ram without any ramdisk or anything else? Am currently using a 128GB SSD as my page file, which seems to have sped my computer up a little bit. Currenly showing about 150mb in page file under task manager.

What's pretty interesting using FancyCache is that because of the ability to cache to ram, there is little to no page file usage. One can see this by running a page file intensive program. In my case, I like to play Arma2. Without a ram disk or FC, as the game world is streamed, there is a lot of preloading of texture file to the page file. With FC, all that data is loaded to ram with no PF usage. The result is a smoother game play experience. Using such a program reduces or eliminates PF usage. So it's becomes a moot point if your PF is enabled. In my case, I leave the PF enabled.

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Originally Posted by Sailindawg

What's pretty interesting using FancyCache is that because of the ability to cache to ram, there is little to no page file usage. One can see this by running a page file intensive program. In my case, I like to play Arma2. Without a ram disk or FC, as the game world is streamed, there is a lot of preloading of texture file to the page file. With FC, all that data is loaded to ram with no PF usage. The result is a smoother game play experience. Using such a program reduces or eliminates PF usage. So it's becomes a moot point if your PF is enabled. In my case, I leave the PF enabled.

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FancyCache and Windows Pagefile doesn't seems to be related in any way. If you experience smoother game play is because FancyCache is doing its job:

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FancyCache caches data on a logical block basis (offsets within a volume/disk) while windows cache manager caches on a virtual block basis (offsets within a file).

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And it doesn't looks like if it has anything to do with system memory management.

I never used W7 so I can't really comment on how it works, but WXP is dumb as hell in that regard. You can throw it all the RAM on the world and it will STILL offload data from RAM to the Pagefile, something that it seems to do based on how much time an application was sitting Idle and/or minimized. This means that if you leave your machine Idle with applications minimized then come back in a few hours, you will notice a lot of Hard Disk usage as it has to read all the data it send to the Pagefile and put it on RAM again as you begin to restore the minimized applications.
This should have been useful at WXP launch era because if your RAM usage was reaching max capacity at the time where 256-512 MB was the standard, it should save some measurable time that Windows did that beforehand and send a recently unused application that was open to the Pagefile to have free RAM in case you suddently wanted to launch another application, something that it could do then inmediately, while if it didn't send the unused data to the Pagefile earlier, you would have to wait for it to do so first PLUS more time of Hard Disk activity to load the actual application. However, that behavior was absolutely not thought with abundant Hardware resources in mind: While that was useful with low RAM machines, if you had only 1 GB in use of your 4 GB and it still sends data to Pagefile, it adds stupid and useless overhead and HD usage.
Moreover, Windows seems to also do this in a stupid fashion. I suppose everyone knows that if you open an application, close it, and open it again, the second time it does so quite faster, and on light applications I would say almost instantly, with nearly no Hard Disk activity. This should be because when you open an application for the first time, Windows has to read ALL of it from the Hard Disk, while after you close it, Windows simply "unclaims" (Not erases or inmediately replaces) the RAM used by it but seems to remember where it was in case it has to use it again. If you compare this to what I stated before of Hard Disk activity when resuming from Idle, it seems than that data DOES get moved from RAM and onto the Pagefile, while it would have been more intelligent to hold a Pagefile copy and a unclaimed RAM one to resume from.
Basically, the only way to make sure that Windows uses only RAM instead of the Pagefile when it has not the need to, is to disable it, and I don't see how FancyCache would change that behavior. Besides, if you want to truely preload something, you need to use a RAMDisk and put it there. This is because not exactly Windows, but the games themselves (As they are the ones that should know WHAT they should preload and when) doesn't do it.

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Originally Posted by Smalltimer

I think this would be much faster actually.

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I can pull about 9000MB/S on ramdisk read rates...... it is a ton faster

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Originally Posted by bearcatrp

Been reading this thread with interest. Do have a few questions as am unsure of a few things. Your saying if I have plenty of ram, currently have 48GB, I can shut off my page file and Win7 will force the page file to my ram without any ramdisk or anything else? Am currently using a 128GB SSD as my page file, which seems to have sped my computer up a little bit. Currenly showing about 150mb in page file under task manager.

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Most avg users can safely turn off page file with 8GB. It really depends on what you do. If you exceed your ram capacity and dont have a page file setup for your system to empty some of your ram data onto, it will be forced to kick one of your running programs out, causing that program to crash. With 48GB of ram, I dont think you would have this issue.

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Originally Posted by zir_blazer

FancyCache and Windows Pagefile doesn't seems to be related in any way. If you experience smoother game play is because FancyCache is doing its job:



And it doesn't looks like if it has anything to do with system memory management.

I never used W7 so I can't really comment on how it works, but WXP is dumb as hell in that regard. You can throw it all the RAM on the world and it will STILL offload data from RAM to the Pagefile, something that it seems to do based on how much time an application was sitting Idle and/or minimized. This means that if you leave your machine Idle with applications minimized then come back in a few hours, you will notice a lot of Hard Disk usage as it has to read all the data it send to the Pagefile and put it on RAM again as you begin to restore the minimized applications.
This should have been useful at WXP launch era because if your RAM usage was reaching max capacity at the time where 256-512 MB was the standard, it should save some measurable time that Windows did that beforehand and send a recently unused application that was open to the Pagefile to have free RAM in case you suddently wanted to launch another application, something that it could do then inmediately, while if it didn't send the unused data to the Pagefile earlier, you would have to wait for it to do so first PLUS more time of Hard Disk activity to load the actual application. However, that behavior was absolutely not thought with abundant Hardware resources in mind: While that was useful with low RAM machines, if you had only 1 GB in use of your 4 GB and it still sends data to Pagefile, it adds stupid and useless overhead and HD usage.
Moreover, Windows seems to also do this in a stupid fashion. I suppose everyone knows that if you open an application, close it, and open it again, the second time it does so quite faster, and on light applications I would say almost instantly, with nearly no Hard Disk activity. This should be because when you open an application for the first time, Windows has to read ALL of it from the Hard Disk, while after you close it, Windows simply "unclaims" (Not erases or inmediately replaces) the RAM used by it but seems to remember where it was in case it has to use it again. If you compare this to what I stated before of Hard Disk activity when resuming from Idle, it seems than that data DOES get moved from RAM and onto the Pagefile, while it would have been more intelligent to hold a Pagefile copy and a unclaimed RAM one to resume from.
Basically, the only way to make sure that Windows uses only RAM instead of the Pagefile when it has not the need to, is to disable it, and I don't see how FancyCache would change that behavior. Besides, if you want to truely preload something, you need to use a RAMDisk and put it there. This is because not exactly Windows, but the games themselves (As they are the ones that should know WHAT they should preload and when) doesn't do it.

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I'm using Win7 64 bit. You cannot compare XP 32 bit to how Win7 64 bit functions. And yes, FC greatly reduces / eliminates page file usage.

There's no need to write to a physical drive with FC intercepting those requests and writing to ram. Comparing to a ram disk, FC gives a whole system boost where a ram disk can only be helpful to one program. From reading the original post, AMD has put out a program, for cost, that seems to function comparably to FC. I was trying to point out a similar software, that's free, without the limitations of the AMD software. I like what AMD has done. It's great software for the right person. FC is very good software, with fewer limitations, and free. Choice is good.

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Originally Posted by Sailindawg

Comparing to a ram disk, FC gives a whole system boost where a ram disk can only be helpful to one program. From reading the original post, AMD has put out a program, for cost, that seems to function comparably to FC.

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In the same way that you say that I can't compare WXP to W7, you can't compare FancyCache and a RAMDisk. They are similar tools as they reserve system RAM for their purpose, but you're comparing a tool that does caching against one that just have to function as a dull Hard Disk for storage capacity. I still think your Pagefile usage values should be bogus somewhere, FancyCache should have no reason to change how Windows uses the Pagefile. In fact, in their forum they say they disabled Pagefile caching...

[QUOTE=zir_blazer;5143621]In the same way that you say that I can't compare WXP to W7, you can't compare FancyCache and a RAMDisk. They are similar tools as they reserve system RAM for their purpose, but you're comparing a tool that does caching against one that just have to function as a dull Hard Disk for storage capacity. I still think your Pagefile usage values should be bogus somewhere, FancyCache should have no reason to change how Windows uses the Pagefile. In fact, in their forum they say they disabled Pagefile caching...[/QUOTE

I appreciate skeptics, but this is annoying. I validated the fact my page file usage with Win7 resource monitor. Both with FC on and off while doing Arma. I know what the results were. You can continue to be skeptical, but instead of debating in a forum, get some hardware and try it. I'm not flaming or otherwise. I've used ram disk and the cache program. The cache program works well. I'm actually using my full 16G ram. If it makes you happy to turn off the PF and run a ram disk, then that is a solution that works for you.