Have a 40gig g3-320 Want to get CACHE and temp files on RAMDrive?

[idata]

My question is who should provide the driver for the ramdrive and is it possible to include it on the BIOS if it will be more elegant there.

Is it Dell for the BIOS approach?

Is it Intel since this is a very new product (I bought the kit with cables and bracket)?

Or is it microsoft? Since they OWN (And I think still own it) the operating system

Instal OSTen?

Or just install a third party solution?

The reason am asking is I recently purchased a LAT2100 with 2 gig of RAM put the recently aquired 320 series 40 gig and install win7 ultimate SOFTWARE and find no difference in performance especially when saving files and using WEB.

I am very discouraged of spending money on technology so I want free driver. I bought this laptop on outlet because I need it for work (OWA, WEB VPN/RDP) and dont want to spend tons of money on technology.

Thanks,

Eric

[idata]

Eric what are you attempting to achieve? RAMDrive must be implemented within the OS. Since Windows does not have this featue, you will need to use a 3rd party program. Note, there are hardware-based RAMDrives. Consumer ones are limited to around 8GB and cost a few hundred. Enterprise ones cost something like $20K+.

Since your system only has 2GB of RAM (and some of that maybe dedicated for an onboard GPU), I would not recommend creating a RAMDrive. You would be taking resources for the primary applications and use them for lower priority workloads.

What is a free driver? A driver just tells an operating system how to interact with a piece of hardware.

OWA and VPN/RDP are applications that run on the network. The bottleneck here is the network latency, bandwidth, and server. If you want to see the benefit of a SSD:

1) See how long it takes to load programs like Photoshop, Visual Studio, etc

2) Run an anti-virus scan

3) Compile code

4) Run some database queries

5) Load a few programs at once

Basically, run applications that are traditionally storage bottlenecked.

[idata]

What I want to achieve is to have a second drive say f: or g: with at least 512 and configure all the "temp" and the content of IE9 cache files to use this new drive. I want to minimize the write on my new SSD as much as possible.Not just to gain speed but also to improve the life of my SSD and I think I will get more battery usage per charge on my 6 Cell. Also I will reuse the old HD for my backup and put it to buffalo NAS. Low power backup low power for my netbook.

I cannot believe that the RAMdrive technology is expensive because creating extra space this way is I think more than 30 years old. Ancient in term of computer years.

I disable paging file.sys on my computer and it is OK. Just want to do the same on browser. The ideal would be to have the OS on 1 Gig RAM and the browser can fully run on the RAMdrive so no more subscriptipn on AV and antispyware product. Just the exe (mozilla or IE9) on the SSD and the files are totally on the separate virtual HD.

Thanks for responding and educating me on the technology.

Eric

[idata]

I would not worry too much about the life of your SSD. SSDs are rated for everyday usage. If you are that worried, use Firefox and disable disk caching.

There are two types of RAM drives.... one created within your OS and that is free with 3rd party programs. Then there are hardware RAMDrives like the Gigabyte iRAM or a TMS RAMSan. These are expensive because RAM is expensive per GB plus the back up power required.

I highly recommend you do not create a RAMDrive with only 2GB avaliable. That will not leave much for other applications and the OS.