Can I use a RAM disk to speed up my IDE?

Question

Duplicate:

RAMDrive for compiling - is there such a thing?

I have an idea how to speed up my IDE.

I want to create a RAM disk and move my solution onto this virtual disk.
I think that this can speed up the IDE because RAM is much faster than a HDD.

Has anyone done this before?

PS: I think, when I have some documents in my program(real world) which are used frequently(for example some document templates) it could be good idea to move these documents onto a RAM disk as well to speed up I/O. Am I wrong?

If power is a problem, a UPS could solve it.

Solution 1

Honestly, if you have Vista/Windows Server 2008 x64 and you jam your workstation with 4 to 8 GB of RAM, for most tasks, everything will be in cache or stored by SuperFetch, which will be a lot easier to manage and just about as high performance as a RAM disk. The RAM disk won't do a thing for you if you're starving your other system RAM to make it work.

BTW, I tried your suggestion a couple of years ago. While it technically worked, copying the necessary data to the RAM disk on every boot took too long and was a pain.

Solution 2

Given sufficient RAM, this problem's been solved for a long time. If you have lots of RAM, stuff from the HD gets cached in it anyhow, and the HD is only the bottleneck the first time you're loading something at boot. As far as the initial boot time, I'd suggest using sleep/suspend mode and simply not rebooting your computer frequently.

Solution 3

I have a 128GB Samsung flash based hard drive and it is FAST. My whole system, VM and IDE included, load in less than one minute.

Solution 4

Under Linux /dev/shm is a ramdisk so you might have some quick success using that as your compile destination (easier than rsyncing your source etc, also has the benefit, if you have one, of reducing any wear on an SSD in your machine).

Solution 5

Personally I'd just buy a SSD disk, you could lose your whole soln at any time if your ram loses power.

Right now I have 4gb of ram and a 150gb 10k rpm velociraptor hard drive for my boot disk, running win xp pro 64bit and everything(VS 2008, sql management studio, and my testing VM's) is very fast.

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