RAM Disk on Mac

[mickrich]

Does anyone ever set up a ram disk when recording/mixing?
On OSX it's very easy to set up.
copy/paste this into terminal

diskutil erasevolume HFS+ “r1″ `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3959731`

You will now see a 2GB RAM Disk on your desktop.
If you copy a session folder into this your performance will scream, especially if the session has lots of audio tracks.
What's happening is you have created a virtual disk using RAM instead of using your actual (mechanical) hard disk so read/write/seek time is REALLY REALLY fast. Transport controls become instant and very large track counts pose no problem.
Problem is that if you crash or when you shut down the RAM disk is gone and so are its contents.
I usually don't use this when tracking in case of a crash but it's great for mixing.
Copy the whole session folder into the RAM disk and open from there so audio will be streaming from the RAM disk.
Every time you hit save also drag the project file (The one you select to open the song that's usually a couple of MB) to the original project folder on your hard drive.
This way if you loose the RAM disk you can reopen where you left off.
(If you are consolidating or bouncing tracks during mixing you will need to copy the complete project folder when you save).

I take no responsibility for any work lost if you use this but you should be ok if you follow the instructions for saving above.
This is extremely useful where you have plenty of free ram that's not being used. eg. If your DAW is using 4GB and you have 8GB available

 

[006]

That's actually pretty cool, did not know about that. Luckily my iMac is running sessions just fine so far, but I imagine this will come in handy later down the road when it starts to get older.

 

[xTomx]

This is really handy - good share dude!

 

[Blacklight_Studio]

I guess it is something similar to what Pro Tools 10HD is doing when you enable the feature of cashing the entire session in to RAM and dedicate corresponding amount of RAM for this purpose?

 

[avrinder]

Rad, thanks for the heads up!

 

[JeffTD]

Gonna try this for editing, see if it helps with the dreaded Cubase multi-edit slowdown. I have 8GB now... might bump that to 12 if this works well!

 

[sinewavealex]

I'm guessing ReadyBoost is the Windows equivalent?

I got 4gb set up at a USB drive plugged in permanently to my desktop. Though I don't use half as much channels as my mixing needs are different, it's very useful for loading large sample libraries with my puny pair of 2GB RAM cards

 

[JeffTD]

No noticeable difference between RAMdisk and HDD for editing unfortunately. Will give it a go with mixing next chance I get.

 

[Morgan C]

I'm guessing ReadyBoost is the Windows equivalent?

I got 4gb set up at a USB drive plugged in permanently to my desktop. Though I don't use half as much channels as my mixing needs are different, it's very useful for loading large sample libraries with my puny pair of 2GB RAM cards

IIRC ReadyBoost is the opposite. This uses RAM as a Hard drive, ReadyBoost uses Hard drive space as RAM.

 

[LeSedna]

There is a way to set this up as a more permanent solution via mounting it at each startup and backup of the ram disk onto your hard disk at every shut down, can't find the link at the moment

 

[Uros]

This might be useful





and some valid info here http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/hom...sc-on-a-pc-more-timeline-cache-emulation.html

 

[rino655]

pointless for PT10 users but cool for everyone else! I use it for hosting a music server and boy does it index like a beast!