Comment by Dalewyn
3 years ago
SSDs currently peak somewhere around 7GB/s transfer speeds, while RAM can easily knock out well over 20GB/s (and that's a low estimate). So anything that benefits from fast transfer speeds and/or low latency will appreciate a RAM disk.
SSDs are also consumable, as mentioned in other comments, so RAM disks are perfect for a scratch disk. HDDs can also serve as a scratch disk, but some tasks also appreciate the aforementioned faster transfer speeds and/or lower latency of SSDs or RAM.
> So anything that benefits from fast transfer speeds and/or low latency will appreciate a RAM disk
Well, anything that doesn't require persistence!
All the products like this that I've seen carry a battery for persistence during power outages.
Define persistency.
You can easily get to about 20 GB/s by using PCI-E 4.0 NVMe in striped 4x configurations. Comparing this 16x setup to single lane SSD access is not a fitting comparison. With prices for NVME finally going down, you can get 8TB at those speeds for under USD 1k.