I love ImDisk and I use it for a few reasons:
- A RAM-based system %TEMP% folder.
- High-performance storage for downloads, compiling, or anything else.
- Avoid slamming my SSDs with tons of writes (browser caches, temp files, etc.).
This is the command I use to create the RAM disk in a Scheduled Task that has a trigger set to run at startup:
imdisk -a -t file -o awe,rem -s 4096M -S 4096 -m R: -p "/fs:ntfs /v:RAM /A:4096 /q /y"
The questions I have (which I didn't see on the FAQ) are:
- I recently added "rem" to see if avoiding write caching would be faster, since RAM should be pretty darn fast on its own. Does anyone know if this is true?
- Is there a better way to create the RAM disk at startup than a Scheduled Task? I worry that it may not be early enough in the startup sequence. How does the toolkit create disks at startup?
- I "aligned" the sectors for performance by using 4K sector sizes, but I really don't know if this matters like it does with aligning partitions on physical disks. Does anyone know if this is useful?
- I don't want a file-backed disk, just RAM. The whole point (for me) is to use RAM instead of disk. I use "awe" without an image file so it actually uses physical RAM and not virtual memory. My understanding is that a "vm" type RAM disk could potentially be swapped to physical disk by the system. It this correct and can it be prevented?
- When using "vm", it doesn't allocate the RAM when you create the disk, so I don't really know how much free memory my system has. In the past, before "awe" was an option, I created the disk, filled it up with an empty file, then deleted the file in order to pre-allocate the memory... Is there a way to make it allocate the RAM without this when using "vm" type?
- The toolkit UI doesn't seem to support "awe" disks, based on the screenshots I've seen. Is this correct?