"Paul McHale" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Does Linux support any RAM drive(s)? How much faster are these drives over > an attached drive? Is there a CPU performance penalty? > > We would like to replace our mechanical drive with a small (<4GB) RAM drive. > The mechanical drive is getting pounded 24 hours a day. In addition to > fatigue, the extra performance would be nice.
The general wisdom is that it's a waste of memory using it for a RAM disk. Generally, it's better to buy the RAM and let the OS decide how to use it for file-system caching. Of course this is in general, and there may well be specific applications that would benefit. If you do use a RAM disk I doubt there's much of a CPU performance hit, other than the fact that, if the RAM disk is actually utilized, the CPU will not have much idle time because it's not waiting on disk I/O. Of course the same applies to a good caching scheme. 4G is really NOT small. Maybe in terms of disk space, but that's still a lot of RAM! > Is it true the x86 architecture is limited to 32 bit addressing and will > never support more than 4GB of address space? Trying to see what the > limitation will be. Actually I think that the Pentium line of processors actually has a 36bit MMU, for 64G of addressable memory. Last time I checked both Windows and Linux could use all that memory. > I know this is a lot of questions. As always, any help is appreciated. Good Luck! Gary
