Using HARD DISK PARTITION as RAM!

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Is it possible to use a small hard disk partition of 10 GB as RAM? ? If we can, then there will be a drastic change in the system performance!

Posted 28-Nov-12 3:52am

bharath_ben

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lewax00 · Answer 1 · 2012-11-28T04:13:00

Yes, it's called a "paging file" in Windows. By default it should be enabled, but you can adjust the size and location by right clicking Computer in the Start menu, going to "Advanced System Settings", then go to the "Advanced" tab and under "Performance" click "Settings...", then go under the "Advanced" tab of that window, and under "Virtual memory" click "Change...". From there you can change the settings for your paging file.

There's also "ReadyBoost", which you can use on a drive you choose by right clicking the driver, going into Properties and going into the ReadyBoost tab and configuring it there, but not all drives are supported for this (I think only flash drives are compatible).

But really, you probably won't see a performance increase. Once you start swapping to and from the paging file everything slows down because you're bottle-necked by the hard drive (Mehdi's answer gives the reason why).

Mehdi Gholam · Answer 2 · 2012-11-28T03:57:00

Solution 1

Ram operates at 1600mhz for DDR3 with a max transfer rate of around 6400mb/s, the best hard disk (ssd) will do a max 400mb/s for plain hard disk around 80mb/s so it is easy to do the maths.

Posted 28-Nov-12 3:57am

Mehdi Gholam

Bernhard Hiller · Answer 3 · 2012-11-28T04:14:00

Have you ever seen that "pagefile.sys" on C:\?
Somewhen ago, there was the concept of "swapping" data from RAM to disk when there was not enough RAM available (and only then). When that happened, it always meant a slow performance.
Nowadays, modern Windows 7 just creates a file of the size of your RAM when Windows is started. I do not know exactly what it does nowadays, but swapping could still be an objective behind it.
And by the way, though it is possible to play with the settings for the pagefile, Windows will do a lot of nonsense with them. On XP, I tried to have a partition of 1 GB for swap only. What did XP do? It did not allow for a swap file bigger than some 10% of the free partition - thanks alot, Microsoft! With Windows 7, I did not try that, just accepted that system performance gets bad with the creation of such an unnecessary file.

Using HARD DISK PARTITION as RAM!

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