June 23, 2009, 5:01 am
Ramdisks are usually spoken of in hushed tones when sysadmins get together. Some view them with awe because of their performance and some view them with skepticism and say they are only useful for creating benchmarks. Almost all of them agree that using them on a regular basis must be done with care because of the problem of losing power shuts immediately shuts down the ramdisk erasing the contents of the ramdisk. However, there are uses for ramdisks besides running benchmarks. More over there are storage devices that use RAM as the storage media that can reach rarefied levels of performance of millions of IOPS.
This article takes a quick break from the 2.6.30 kernel bonanza of file systems to discuss ramdisks and file systems that use them, such as tmpfs. It will also discuss possible uses for ramdisks. Finally it will present some storage devices that use RAM as the storage media. These devices range from very expensive enterprise class storage to devices that can fit into your desktop…
