I did a quick search and didn't see anything recent. I just setup my MSI RAM disk (16GB/1.5GB) since I haven't seen anything pull more than 10 GB. I've noticed that things are much more responsive, probably due to the tmp files being on RAM now (and way faster than my SSD). 
 
Are there downsides?
It seems they would just be to tmp and caches, so no loss there. It also seemed to really help my video cards.
 
Initially, I'm like really surprised about how much better things work. I'm pretty sure even a small RD would work wonders, but the RAM is just sitting there anyway.
 

Also interested to know and also interested to know what you put in it.
 
Sonar cache? windows page file? Anything else?
 
How much do you feel is enough?

Putting a page file in a RAM disk pretty much defeats the purpose. If you've got the RAM there is no reason to page. Now for all those tmp files, well file access is way better than with even an SSD. And there are lots of tmp files floating about these days. 
Just thought I'd ask and see if it is real.
I haven't much played with RAM disks since Atari days, but saw and enabled it.  The RAM wasn't being used anyway.

That's so funny because I had not heard that term since my Atari days. When I saw the thread title I thought someone had either fallen through a time warp or it was a typo :) 
I remember how fast things worked but it all was lost when you shut down. I always loaded Dr T KCS into RAM Disk. 

This sounds very interesting though I know very little about it. Are there any how to's about it somewhere?
 
Ludwig

i have 2 SSD disk (240GB and 90GB) And also 2 harddisk (1TB and 3TB) i installed windows and Sonar in 240GB SSD
16GB page file (i have 16GB ram) and my frequently used program cacheis in 90GB SSD
1TB harddisk for vsti and other programs
3TB backup and old projects.

I think I don't understand cache that much...
 
I think windows cache is the pagefile
 
Sonar is pretty easy to setup.
 
Is there other cache settings that benefit from being moved to a faster storage?
 
How do I set them up?
 
Regarding windows pagefile, I have read people saying it's safe to remove it completely (I have 16GB of ram,most of it never got used), other says it's best to leave something cause some programs NEED one, other tells to let windows take care of it... I understand that it put stress on ssd so I tend to send it to my bigger mechanical drive, not sure how it affect performances. I'm on windows 7 x64 by the way.

Dyonight
I think I don't understand cache that much...
 
I think windows cache is the pagefile

There are many types of caches, even in the same OS. One important one in the case of Sonar would the be the disk cache. MD (magnetic, or non-SSD disks) are actually very slow. If there was no disk cache, things would run painfully slow. A cache can hide the slow disk issues from the user by temporarily "writing" to RAM, and then stream the data to the disk in the background afterwards. Or in the case of reading, start reading the next blocks of data ahead of time into RAM in case that is what the program was planning to do next, which is very often the case.
 
MD access times are especially bad, something like 10ms. SSD access times are super fast in comparison, something like 0.02ms. That makes a huge difference when reading lots of small blocks of data at random locations (say, a sampler loading lots of different samples into memory).
 
A pagefile is a different kind of cache. Applications use virtual memory, which means the OS can give an application all the memory it asked for, even if you don't have that much RAM available. So if a new application asks for memory but the RAM is filled, the OS will save the memory from another application (or even the same application) that hasn't used it recently to disk (into the pagefile). Then later when that other application tries to do something with the memory that is now saved to pagefile, the OS will first save yet another application's memory to the pagefile, and then load the requested memory into the freed RAM and let the application continue. It's a sort of musical chairs with memory.
 
So that is why putting a pagefile into a RAM disk defeats the purpose, because now you have less RAM available for applications, requiring the pagefile to be used sooner.

Good explanation thanks!
 
When you talk of "disk cache" I understand physical faster memory on the actual drive. Is there a way to virtually boost this hardware cache with a ramdisk or something? Is it worth it?

Caching can get very complicated very quickly....

HDDs have their own (built in hardware) RAM for temporary caching purposes and helps in giving faster write times for small files, but the size of audio files (especially multiple files being spooled at the same time) rapidly fills that up.

Windows itself operates a cache system where data an application wishes to store to disk is held in RAM by Windows until there is enough of a break in other activity for Windows to actually send the data to a disk. This is usually of the order of milliseconds or a very few seconds at most, and is why sometimes an application will repost a successful safe to the user but if followed by an immediate Windows blue screen the data is lost.

By default Sonar bypasses the Windows caching system. This is partly because it avoids the problem that if Sonar or Windows crashed before data is actually written to disk and Windows caching were active the audio data would be lost. Though in practice that kind of situation generally results in corrupt data or Windows not even realising the data is there on the drive as the necessary indexing wasn't carried out bfore the crash.

Spooling to disk while bypassing the Windows cache at one time also resulted in faster and smoother sequential reads/writes of large files such as multi-track audio. Whether bypassing Window's cache is a speed boost with modern HDDs which have larger buffer caches than their predecessors can only be deternined by trying it and seeing what happens. I've activated the Windows caching in Sonar's preferences before now and seen it load entire projects into RAM the first time they're played then keep the data in RAM. Which gives very fast data throughput indeed so long as you have sufficient free RAM in the first place.

The downside is a Sonar or Windows crash will lose everything recorded that's being held in RAM. Which may not be a situation you'd want to find yourself in.

Which is, of course, also the disadvantage of using a RAM disk. Until what's stored there is saved elsewhere it is virtual data that ceases to exist the millisecond Windows shuts down or reboots. The trade-off being speed for data security.