RAM DISK can I use the SDRAM or USB RAM BUT???

When I saw your BETA Memroy product its description made sense. I figured I could download and install the software and use one of my external EXTRA 8 gig Micro SDRAM chip that I had bought for my cell phone as a backup or in case I lost mine.

When I luanch your memory program the drive of the above disk can not be ticked. Aparently all drives that are already in use cant be ticked.

Im not new to computers but I'm a bit lost on how this pgm works.

What I had to do was eject my 8 gig MINI or MICRO SDRAM then I notice drive K: appeared in the lst of drives I could tick so I ticked it.

Then I popped in my 8 gig sdram chip and the explorer (which opened) said that I needed to format to 500 MB.

I thought that sucked becasue I wanted to use at least 7 of the 8 gigs of faster memory.

The figure 500 came about becasue I only had about 700 megs of free memory avaiable when I created or choose my 500 mb figure.

Did I do something wrong? Why are the temporary memory in this case my SDRAM slot with an adapter in it for thhe MICRO or Mini 8 gig not avaiable when I first lauch your program.

I dont understand why, for example lets say I had 1 8 gig USB memory drive and 1 8gig SDRAM drive why both drive letters wouldnt be avaiable and why I couldnt use most or all of each 8 gig memory space.

I am sure the computer would run a lot faster via the USB or SDRAM memory that from the hard drive.

Maybe Im missing the whole point. It almost seems like your program is only allowing us to use the memory thats avaiable when your program is launched. The internal memory that comes with the computer. Heck if that is the case I thought Windows already allocated that memory as needed.

I'm confused. It would be great if I could use all of my 8 gig of free SDRAM memory. I don't need to remove it, Don't need it and it would be nice to have it working and speeding my computer up.

Thanks for the product but its a little over my head.

Coley

OK, Im the one with the 8 Gig SDRAM chip that I could only format to 500 MB.

I created an image file in it and sure enough when I checked it It showed about 250 being usd and about 250 free.

AND MY COMPUTER IS RUNNING FASTER.

BUT, How could I get your program to use the entire 8 gigs so I know I would almost never run out of memory and my computer would probably haul but now matter how much I had on the screen?

Well, I am afraid you are missing the whole point. Let me try to explain all this stuff in plain English.

Basically your computer works with two types of memory:

1) RAM (Random Access Memory). It is a very fast but volatile storage, usually comprises of integrated circuits or chips built into the computer. You normally cannot plug or unplug this memory unless you are an IT specialist and understand what you are doing.

2) External storage. It can be a HDD (Hard Disk Drive), USB stick or an SD card. These devices are normally slower than RAM, but non-volatile and have a larger capacity. You cannot really plug or unplug an HDD unless you are an advanced user, however you can plug and unplug USB memory and memory cards such as SD.

In your case it appears you have got an SD card, but not SDRAM. Despite the similarity in the names, these belong to different classes of storage. An SD card cannot be used a RAM disk, simply because it is not RAM. When you plug it in, your computer assigns a drive letter to it and represents the card as a disk, so you can save and open files from it, but once again, this is not RAM.

The RAM disk software only works with RAM installed in your computer. It does not work with anything else. Therefore, whether you can use the RAM disk software depends on the amount of physical RAM in your computer, regardless of presence of any external SD devices.

Hope this makes sense.

For sure I'm missing the point. I owned a computer repair shop for ten years and did many memory upgrades.

I'm aware that the memory we installed in the computers (back in my day it was 4 megs to 16, 64 if you had a fat wallet).

I understood the physical memory we added to the motherboard was much faster than the read and write time of a hard drive.

There are two subject or items that still have me confused.

1) I thought windows already had a memory manager that "if needed" would allocate as much ram as it could then after x amount of programs were opened that the physical ram would fill up and dump over onto the hard drive as virtual memory and the computer would come to a crawl until most programs were closed and or a reboot (since files seem to linger behind that are no longer needed).

2) I know there are different speeds thumb drives and or SDHC cards (In my case I'm using a spare 8 gig micro Ultra SDHC card with an adapter [there is some info on the card 120 HD MIN class 4]. I have no idea what the difference in between the read and write & seek times between my hard drive and this 8 gig extra memory. nor the speed of the 2 gig of memory in my netbook, However I have made an assumption (and I may be wrong [its got an IDE not a SATA] but I thought any solid state memory was inheritly faster than hard drives, at least faster than IDE hard drives.

If I'm correct so far I don't see how SoftPerfectRAM DISk is helping if its not allowing me to take advantage of the 8 gigs of my SD card be it a USB, Micro SD, Mini or regular SD cards?

I must be missing the point. Then again if I am correct that the preceeding drives are faster than an average IDE hard drive why not build an option into your program that allows needed virtual memory to transfer to the cards "if" they are in deed faster than most hard drives?

I'm still confused whats going on thats letting my computer run faster with your program with the scenario that I mentioned earlier. As I mentioned I wanted to use my 8 gig SD card in addition to my netbooks 2 gigs of ram. When I clicked to add a drive my inserted drives were ommited from the list. I noticed my 8 gig card was called drive K: I ejected K: reloaded your program and K: was available in the list of avaiable drives in your program. So I chose K: but I think I olnly had about 600 megs of RAM avaiable and selected 500 megs as the desired amount.

When I plugged my 8 gig SD card in (XP) a box popped up and told me that my 8 gig card needed to be formatted but would only alow me to format to 500 megs. I thought this was odd but figured what to heck, lets see ifit runs faster and it appears to run faster. If these usb thumb and SD cards are faster than IDE or who knows SATA what would be wrong with using them via your program (the extra ones that were not keeping data on)?

I hate to be a pain but I guess Im till missing the point. If you have time to reply again could you state the average read, write and seek times of IDE and SATA hard drives VS physical ram, VS thumb drives VS SD cards.as compared to average physical memory found in economy netbook computers

In your reply you state that the external plug in memory chips are slower than internal physical memory. I'm sure your correct but aren't they faster than the virtual memory offered by hard drives?

Your SD card, when plugged in, is already a disk. Perhaps if you conceptually think of the SD card as a "disk" and not as "RAM" it may help. An SD card is NOT RAM in the same sense as system RAM.

If you want to get windows to use your "SD disk", then set the system and internet temp directories to use it.
[ask-leo.com]

You can put your pagefile on there too.

However, an SD card is NOT fast, even the faster versions, compared to a HDD, so I doubt you will see any performance gains. And a SD card has a limited number of writes. This means you will "wear it out" quite quickly.

Conduct your own performance tests using Crystal Disk Mark [crystalmark.info]

I found this thread while looking through information about this Ramdisk program and feel like I need to clarify some things as I think Coley is still not understanding what is going on.

The function of this program is not to add RAM to your computer. If you want to speed up your computer using an external drive (USB Flash, SD, etc...) so that Windows uses it for swap and temporary files instead of your Hard Drive then turn on ReadyBoost. You do this by inserting your USB drive, it will be given a letter by windows. Go to My Computer, right click on the drive and click on Properties. Once the properties window comes up, click on the ReadyBoost tab. In that tab you will be able to initialize the drive for ReadyBoost. I believe this is the functionality you are looking for. It pretends that your USB drive is now an extension of your ram and minimizes Virtual Memory writes to your Hard Drive. You can read more about this here: [en.wikipedia.org]

Now onto what this particular program does. A RamDisk is software that emulates a drive on your computer using a predefined number of blocks out of your RAM. Let's say you have 4 GB of RAM on your computer and you constantly find yourself using only 2-3 GB of that when you are running software. What you can do is create a RamDisk that is 1 GB in size. When you create this RamDisk, the program allocates 1 GB of RAM from your computer. Therefore you will see your RAM usage go up by 1 GB. After it allocates this space it creates a virtual drive that is mounted under a drive letter on your computer, lets say R for instance. When you go to My Computer and look at (R you will see that it is the same size as the amount of RAM that it is taking up. What is the purpose for this? As stated before, RAM is the fastest memory on your computer (not counting the registers on your processor which are the fastest for data storage and retrieval, although they are very small in size). Since this drive now resides in your RAM the write and read speeds are incredibly fast. You pretty much have a drive that can go as fast as anything that accesses it, it becomes the strongest link on the proverbial chain. The drive also loses everything that is stored on it as soon as you unmount the RamDisk. Therefore it can be used as a scratchpad for testing, or as a storage of sensitive files that you are transfering from one place to another. That way it doesn't end up on your hard drive where someone else could retrieve it at another point in time even if it was deleted. I hope this better clarifies the issue for you.

RamDisk - Turn a predefined amount of RAM into a drive on your computer.
ReadyBoost - Turn a predefined amount of Flash storage (which is a drive) into "extra" RAM