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I was reading some here ---> http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/radeon-memory/Pages/ramdisk-consumer.aspx (http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/radeon-memory/Pages/ramdisk-consumer.aspx)

Has anyone tried this with a system with 8gb of ram or less? Did you notice any difference when loading windows?

Using part of RAM as a virtual drive existed for years. The question is - are AMD implementation actually better than microsoft's precache or superfetch that uses spare RAM to preload data?

Google "zfs filesystem"

It can be used on BSD variants and if you are up to the work necessary on Linux and OSX.
ZFS uses unused ram automatically for caching and it can use SSDs for an additional space cache giving you practical SSD performance for the entire Disk array. Added to that it is has built in RAID0/1/5/6 on partition and file level among with other features. Probably overkill, but if you really are into that kind of stuff it is the none-plus-ultra currently.
There also is BTRFS built in with Linux which eventually aims to incorporate said features too, but it is still a long way to get there.

The thing with zfs however to get the most benefit from it (that is never again loosing any data along with incredible performance) you need ECC ram and a mainboard which supports it. Since if there is a random bit-flip in memory there is no way to detect the error otherwise. AMD RAMDisk will be susceptible to this kind of thing too as well as any file system. It is just that the more caching the more likely it is to have a random bit error somewhere...

I found at least a couple of really freeware alternatives (for windoz) last year. Both of them worked, but I did not find much use for them.

Ramchip based SSD's are the best.

Is there any possibility of running Windows 7 off of your Ram only?

No.  As soon as you restart, you'd have to reinstall Windows.  And I'm pretty sure there's at least one restart involved in the Windows setup process to begin with...

Yeah you're probably right. Next choice is a flash drive.


Any experience with Windows 7 on a flash drive?

It would be horribly, horribly slow.

30MB/s max read/write speed, but often much less than that.  Poor IOPS (I think worse than traditional HDD).  Really, if you want to try that, just get an SSD.  It's the same thing, but made to hold things like OS's.

Crap... Even for a mining rig only?

With linux no problem.

For a mining rig, sure.  It'd be slow to start up, but if it's a mining rig, who cares?

Sweet. Well If I get a decent USB 3.0 Flash drive it might work okay.. and yeah who cares if it's slow to boot.

I might try Linux though...