Anyone use a ram drive?

[mapakunk]

Has anyone ever tried recording to a "ram" drive? virtual drive on your ram. If nothing else is running and there is free ram, wouldn't it be the fastest way to save the audio data as you go(no buffering) then, when you find the take you want, you could delete the other takes, (so as not to totally bog your system down) then transfer the good takes to your hard drive.

 

[Slackmaster2K]

It wouldn't necessarily be that beneficial. For recording and playback, it would offer no advantages because you couldn't create a big enough ram drive to hold all the tracks that would be required to make the hard drive be a bottleneck. In the old days the hard drive was certainly a limiting factor. Now it is only a factor when your track count is extremely high, or you've got hardware issues and something isn't working right.

For doing large amounts of DSP, the processing itself typically is much slower than the actual file access. Applying a good reverb to a 50MB file might take 20 seconds, while just reading an entire 50MB file would only take 2-5 seconds. Reading can happen during the DSP process without adding much if any overhead.

Then you have to consider the major drawback which is that if windows crashes or you have a power blip, you're going to lose your current takes.

Slackmaster 2000

 

[Eurythmic]

If they weren't so overpriced, I think it would be a lot of fun to record on one of those PCI RAMdrives by Platypus. Basically, it's a PCI card that you fit with SDRAM. I want to say they have 8 slots per card. Perhaps the price has dropped since then, but when they were released late in 2000, the 4GB model (with 8 512MB sticks of SDRAM) cost $11,000. And considering that the PCI card alone is worth about $20, that's a pretty insane price.

But it sure would be fun to play with.