Unleashing Accelerated Speeds with RAM Drives

Playing with Blocks

Time is money, and sometimes that means you need a faster way to process data. Solid state drives (SSDs) and, more specifically, non-volatile memory express (NVMe) devices have helped alleviate the burden of processing data to and from a backing store. However, at times, even SSD technology is not quite fast enough, which is where the RAM drive comes into the picture.

Typically, the RAM drive is used as temporary storage for two reasons: Its capacities tend to be lower (because the technology is more expensive), and more importantly, it is a volatile technology; that is, if the system were to lose power or go into an unstable state, the contents of that RAM drive would disappear. Depending on the type of data being processed, the reward can often outweigh the risks, which is why the RAM drive can potentially be the better option.

In this article, I rely on the RapidDisk suite to create and manage RAM drives. The RapidDisk software project [1] provides an advanced set of Linux kernel RAM drive and caching modules with which you can dynamically create and remove RAM drives of any size or map them as a temporary read cache to slower devices.

The system used in this article is an older system with limited memory clocked at a slow speed. More modern and faster systems with faster memory will produce significantly different results than those found here. The dmidecode command summarizes the configuration and capabilities of memory DIMMs and revealed that my system has four DDR3 RAM devices of 2048MB configured at speeds of 1333MTps (mega transfers per second).