Question

I found a lot of good topics on Stack Overflow concerning this, but my question is a bit more specific. A lot of companies are using this software to host the same services we do…

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

Apparently the Read/Write speed to a Virtual Disk is insanely faster, and as we run very intensive I/O software, I would like to write something to do the same thing. My only needs are that it runs the application on a Virtual Drive (for the increased I/O speeds) and copies the data over to the physical location on the Hard-Drive every X minutes.

Would this be pretty easy to accomplish? What should I look into using to accomplish this?

EDIT

It looks like I can use the following Dokan Library, but would “subst” command in Windows yield any I/O performance increases, or would this library be the best bet?

http://dokan-dev.net/en/about/

Answer 1

This really isn’t a C#/.NET question, unless you want to write your own RAM disk driver. Drivers like the one at your link have been around for a long time, and they do have insane read/write speeds, at the cost of RAM availability to your application and the OS. That may not be a problem in your case, if the machine in question has lots of RAM.

The programming part of it is the periodic writing of RAM disk contents to disk. As a RAM disk usually shows up as just another drive, this is a simple matter of copying files from it to a physical disk. You could do that in C#, but it would work just as well in a number of scripting languages.

If this is a high end application, look into solid state SATA drives. They have read/write speeds considerably faster than hard drives, and the data is persistent across crashes, power failures, etc.