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RE: About the RAM disk solution ....

Posted by AbeCollins (A) on November 20, 2014 at 11:48:52

In Reply to: RE: About the RAM disk solution .... posted by beppe61 on November 20, 2014 at 08:41:19:

First of all, for 2-ch audio playback there is no bottleneck at all within any modern PC or Mac. Audio playback is not resource, disk, or I/O intensive. It just isn't. You can use the slowest and very quiet 5400rpm 2.5" laptop drives which will be more than sufficient.

Some folks use RAM disk so the music is pre-loaded and played out of RAM so the spinning disk drive is not being accessed while the music is playing. One theory is that if the disk heads are moving to access the music file, you might hear it.... or just the fact that there's a signal (noise) from the disk I/O, that might be an issue. All highly debatable stuff in terms of whether it matters or not, and the only way to determine any benefit is to try for yourself.

The benefit of using a RAM disk with SSD is also debatable. The SSD has no moving parts so who cares if it's being directly accessed while playing music. Some will say that the mere fact that it is being accessed might produce noise due to the I/O to the SSD. Again, in the weeds audiophile stuff. Try for yourself and see if it matters.

And finally, many music players like Audirvana Plus, Pure Music, and others incorporate their own form of RAM disk often called 'memory play'. Again, music is preloaded into your system RAM before playback so there are no disk or SSD I/O operations taking place while playing music.

As for experimenting with RAM disk, Tony had some comments on how to do it in Windows. Here's how on a Mac with no special additional software or drivers. Just some command line stuff in the Terminal window:

Create experimental 1GB RAM DISK on Mac

Disk Utility shows the 1GB RAMDISK

Edits: 11/20/14

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