Ram Drive

n-Track Studio Discussion Forum
1

Anyone tried it?

2

Has anyone attempted recording to a Ram Drive using N-Track, then transferring to a normal HDD.

I’m not sure if it’s technically feasible or provides any performance advantages. I checked into some free Ram Drive software but the storage capacity is limited to only a few MB.

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

3

Hiya Tommy,

I’m not sure there’s much benefit to using Ramdrives for recording audio data. The hard disk drives of today are more than fast enough to read/write many channels of audio. I’ve used ramdisks to run systems without hard drives (PC routers etc…). Most ramdisks are limited in size due to their addressing schemes.

How are you thinking of using ramdisks??

.-=gp=-.

4

Thanks for the reply, chutz.

I thought this may reduce the wear and tear on the harddrive from the large amount of data transfer related with multi-channel recording.

I wasn’t expecting any performance improvement. I just wanted to ensure that it woouldn’t degrade the performance.
I’ve researched some ram-drive software suppliers, and they state they can address the as much RAm as the system will hold (up to 4GB with 32-bit systems).

5

Tommy,

Ultimately, that’s what n-track does by buffering, it’s storing the data going to or from the drive in memory so that reads/writes can be deferred to minimize the interrupts.

I think you may actually degrade performance to some degree, because you would be engaging the cpu in managing the ramdrive, and using memory that could otherwise be used by applications. In truth, I’ve never tried it. I may certainly apply to slower machines capturing a large amount of data that couldn’t be written to disk quickly enough.

Experimentation would be key. Who knows there may be some benefits to be had. Years ago I had a Pentium 233 on a board that could only cache 64MB, I put 128 in it, and used the upper 64 as a ram drive - it did perform amazingly well.

Please post your results if you try it.

.-=gp=-.

6

Or, if you’ve got the cash, try a platypus qikdrive.

7

This is an interesting topic for me. I do more 2 track (stereo) editing of live performances than multi-track and have wondered about the performance benefits of editing files on a RAM drive. I believe that adding effects, removing noise and even multiple cuts would happen much faster when accessed in RAM rather than on the harddrive (even a fast harddrive).

Does anyone have experience with editing stereo tracks with a RAM drive setup?

Mike

8

My experience with editing (applying effects, noise reduction etc.) is that the CPU plays a bigger role in the time it takes to process than anything else (RAM, HD speed etc.)

editing a single wav will not require all that much streaming of data (compared to playing back multiple wav files).

But the processing of the effects takes a lot of processing power usually.

Faster processor = faster fx applied.
RAM doesn’t seem to make all that much difference an I don’t think you would be maxing out your HD throughput.

Rich

9

I suspect that Rich is right. If we were talking about trivial edits, and a number of them, then the RAM drive would speed things up. But you also have to take into account the time to copy the file to RAM and back to disk.

Recording to RAM drive and then copying to disk doesn’t reduce the usage of the disk unless you discard a lot of what you’ve recorded. Even then, I wouldn’t bother for that reason. Hard drives are incredibly cheap and reliable considering the job they’re asked to do! Unless you’re very unlucky, or unless you bang it around, you’ll get your $100 or so’s worth out of a typical hard drive long before it fails.

10

All good points. It appears it’s not really worth the adeed expense and effort for a limited gain

Thanks to all.

Tommy-J