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I've some software that wants access to a very fast disk. I could buy an SSD, but my server has approx 64GB of ram spare. Is it possible to use a portion of that unused RAM to create and mount a virtual disk?

I'm using either Ubuntu or CentOS.

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3 Answers

up vote 8 down vote accepted

Tmpfs might help:

mount -t tmpfs -osize=4g tmpfs /mountpoint

You'll lose whatever is there if you reboot, though. It may be okay for temporary files, but it is not a replacement for an SSD.

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Any unused RAM will be automatically allocated for caching reads / buffering writes - and you get the added advantage that its automatically flushed to disk. Certainly there will be times (e.g. after a reboot) when the cache might benefit from being primed - but that's just a matter of reading all the files.

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You could probably use /dev/shm for this, as long as the files saved are temporary. Ubuntu apparently auto-mounts this filesystem. See this superuser question.

Alternatively you can create a custom ramdisk this way:

mount -t tmpfs -o size=SIZE tmpfs /where/to/mount

As SIZE you can specify either a size in K, M or G or a percentage of physical RAM (ie size=50%).

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