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rowan · 08-30-2009, 09:23 AM

With regards to reliability an all RAM drive used for paging should in theory be more reliable (and significantly faster) than a mechanical hard drive. If you use it for paging only then retention of contents when you power down isn't an issue, in fact some may consider that a security benefit.

If your OS supports "excessive" levels of swap then using an addon RAM drive for swap effectively increases your available system RAM... it can address (in a roundabout way) more than your mainboard can physically support. It won't be swapping at native RAM speeds because of the overheads of the PCIe bus, SATA interface, etc, but it's still a hell of a lot faster than a mechanical disk. (I don't think this trick would work with a 32 bit OS because of the 4GB limit)

I seem to recall seeing a 5 1/4" bay SATA version of the iRAM, or perhaps it's another name made by another manufacturer. I was looking into this a little while ago, but for the price it may be worth considering just upgrading RAM and/or mainboard...

08-30-2009, 09:23 AM
rowan Too lazy to set a custom title Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: Australia Posts: 17,393	With regards to reliability an all RAM drive used for paging should in theory be more reliable (and significantly faster) than a mechanical hard drive. If you use it for paging only then retention of contents when you power down isn't an issue, in fact some may consider that a security benefit. If your OS supports "excessive" levels of swap then using an addon RAM drive for swap effectively increases your available system RAM... it can address (in a roundabout way) more than your mainboard can physically support. It won't be swapping at native RAM speeds because of the overheads of the PCIe bus, SATA interface, etc, but it's still a hell of a lot faster than a mechanical disk. (I don't think this trick would work with a 32 bit OS because of the 4GB limit) I seem to recall seeing a 5 1/4" bay SATA version of the iRAM, or perhaps it's another name made by another manufacturer. I was looking into this a little while ago, but for the price it may be worth considering just upgrading RAM and/or mainboard...