Setting Up RAM disk for Processing??

[GeneralT001]

Hi,
 
I recently put together a new computer with 64 GBs of RAM. I want to allocate 32GBs of this for processing (via RAM disk usage) in Pixinsight. I'm not sure how to go about doing this. Can someone point me to a tutorial or explain the process? I tried fiddling on my own and have failed. 
 
My D:\ drive is an SSD so I'm pretty sure that's not the way to do it. How do you tell the computer to use this 32 GBs of RAM?

Here is what I set up in PI:

[John_Gill]

Hi,

I would rather store the current processing images/masks etc on the SSD and also setup PixInsight to use the SSD as the "swap storage directories".  Let the Window/MacOS/Linux allocate/use the  RAM for processing.  With 64Gb of RAM things should fly.  The processes themselves are fairly small, but the images and "process action" results in PixInsight being memory hungry.

Hope this helps.
Look up
John

[GeneralT001]

Hi,

Yes, that would be my intention, to just use the RAM disk for the processing side and save all files onto an SSD or HDD.

What is a good program for creating the RAM disk? I've heard of AMD Radeon RAMdisk/DataRam RAM disk but these seem to be limited in RAM disk size, unless you buy the non-free version. Others that aren't limited are ImDisk/OSFMount/Soft Perfect. Any ideas as to which is the way to go?

[GeneralT001]

So I ended up downloading Dataram and made a RAM disk of 32GBs and set up four Temp folders for use in PI. It made no difference in the benchmarks - still around 48 secs? I expected some improvement?

Could I be doing something wrong?

[GeneralT001]

Okay, after further reflection I realized my first test I did was with the NVMe SSD which is what I was comparing the RAM disk results too - they were both around 48 sec. When I reran the test using the SSD I get about 62 seconds - so the RAM disk does actually speed things up by about 14 sec in the benchmark test.

Question is though is that enough to warrant using a RAM disk - I was hoping it would bring the time down to around 30 sec? Not sure I will bother with a RAM disk.

[RickS]

My first quick tests also showed little improvement from using a RAM disk vs a NVMe SSD on Linux on a Threadripper 1950X system.  It's already very fast! I'm getting times under 23 seconds.

[GeneralT001]

My first quick tests also showed little improvement from using a RAM disk vs a NVMe SSD on Linux on a Threadripper 1950X system.  It's already very fast! I'm getting times under 23 seconds.

Yes, same for me so will just stick with the NVMe. That AMD Threadripper seems amazing, I might have gone with AMD - but too much of an Intel chicken

[RickS]

Yes, same for me so will just stick with the NVMe. That AMD Threadripper seems amazing, I might have gone with AMD - but too much of an Intel chicken

I did a bunch of homework before spending the money and everything went as smoothly as I hoped.  And I don't have to worry about Meltdown