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Over the years the number one issue that prevents SSD from being adopted wildly to a wider audience is the lack of disk storage space. If you have a regular physical spindle hard disk, this guide would also help you reduce your disk size. 4 seconds, Photoshop with a giant TIF in just 4.8 seconds and Excel with a huge spreadsheet in just 1.9 seconds.If you have an SSD drive, this would be more beneficial for you. With the two together, we were able to load Word 2010 in a mere. If you can possibly afford it, the combination of SSD with RAM Disk is simply unbeatable. Considering that buying additional RAM is a lot cheaper than upgrading to SSD, many users may find the RAM Disk a cheaper option. However, the SSD alone was noticeably faster than the HDD + RAM Disk combo in some cases, particularly when loading the heavy Photoshop CS 5.1 application. However, on a typical PC the Users and Common folders are so huge that you'd need a lot more than 4GB of available RAM Disk space to house them.Īs you can see in the chart, using the RAM Disk with the hard drive cut load times in half. If you use applications that don't write to any folder but C:\Program Files or if you're able to move the entirety of your C:\Program Files\Common Files folder and your C:\Users folder over to the RAM Disk, you'll achieve maximum performance with any storage drive as everything will load from RAM. Because part of the software, at least in our tests, remained on the storage drive, pairing the RAMDisk with an SSD proved the fastest option. However, even with the hard drive, the difference in launch times with the RAM disk was dramatic. To see the difference, we loaded four popular applications - Adobe Reader, Excel 2010, Photoshop CS 5.1 and Word 2010 - onto the hard drive, timed their open times and then installed them on the RAM Disk instead. We then applied the same tests, using a speedy Kingston HyperX SH100S3 SSD instead of a hard drive in the same notebook.īecause most applications leave at least some of their files in a variety of folders on the C drive by default (ex: C:\Program Files\Common Files) none of these applications loaded completely from memory, even after we installed them to the RAM Disk. In real life, these speedy transfer speeds result in much faster application opens.
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