Affordable physical RAM disk

spliff · Nov 5, 2011

I am only aware of one RAM disk on amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/ACARD-ANS-9010-Dynamic-Module-including/dp/B001NDX6FE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1320525771&sr=8-1]Amazon.com: ACARD ANS-9010 Dynamic SSD SATA 3G-to-DDR2 RAM DISK Drive (RAM Module not including): Electronics[/URL]

It's about $350. That's too much. I can build and entire computer and install 16GB and use half for a RAM disk for the same price. Does anyone know of a cheaper RAM disk that costs around $100 that holds at least 8GB of RAM? Doesn't need to be fast memory or have battery retention. I just need a RAM disk so I can play Saints Row 2 on my PC. An SSD isn't fast enough to counter the loading bug. They have no plans of fixing the bug; only telling you if you want to play the game, buy an XBOX360.

Kramy · Nov 6, 2011

I'm not aware of any cheap RAM-disk cards.

Best bet is to grab a board with lots of RAM slots and install tons of RAM in it. If 8GB is enough space, 16GB in any modern computer will let you reach that. Some boards allow 24GB or 32GB, although some allow 32GB only with expensive 8GB DIMMs. 4x4GB, 6x4GB, and 8x4GB are your cheapest options, depending on what your board supports.

aliasfoxkde · Apr 21, 2016

I know this post is pretty old but I'm wanting to do the same thing so I figured I'd respond here.

Your best best would be to use the RAM on your local computer through a software RAM disk. The benefits over using a physical RAM disk is speed (because the SATA connection limits your speed to ~300MB/s read/write and RAM bandwidth limit is 6.4GB/s). So a software configuration could offer 100x the speed of any SSD out to date. The actual speed will be a little lower but how can you complain. You will also be able to make a larger RAM disk (up to 128GB on some motherboards). The only real downside would be that you can't boot from the software disk, so it would just make your applications and etc. faster. Though this isn't desired, it also doesn't carry a $600 price tag for the hard disk controller alone, plus the extra RAM. You also don't really need to change anything or buy any hardware, so you could just try it out. Also, if you wanted to be ridiculous about it, you could setup a raid 0 with 2 ram disks. And you don't need redundancy because the RAM disk gets stored to your regular hard disk (because RAM is volatile).

By the way, one way you can fix the limitation of not being able to boot from the Virtual/Software RAM disk would be to setup a virtual hypervisor on the machine. In that configuration, the virtual hard disk would initialize first and then run your OS and you could also manage several operating systems. It would be a little more difficult to setup but again there's no additional cost, just time, and it would eliminate the limitations.

http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/faster-than-an-ssd-how-to-turn-extra-memory-into-a-ram-disk

Affordable physical RAM disk

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