Create a RAM Drive

RAM drives are reserved space in RAM memory that appear as local drives. The performance of a RAM drive is faster than accessing hard drives or SDD drives.

RAM drives can be used by AVEVA software to improve performance of database operations where faster read and write access to files is needed. AVEVA have customized the ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver, a third party open-source software component, and included it as part of the AVEVA Administration product install.

Customers report poor performance running activities like Database Integrity Checker (DICE) on large projects. Configuring and testing the scenario using a RAM drive gave performance improvements by over a factor of two.

Create a RAM Drive

Click RamDisk on the Tools tab. The ImDisk Virtual Disk Drive window is displayed.

From the ImDisk Virtual Disk Drive window, select File > Mount new virtual disk or click the Mount New.. button. The Mount new virtual disk window is displayed.

Note:
The layout and content of this form comes from the 3rd party.

Note:
RAM drives are constrained by the amount of RAM within the machine. AVEVA E3D requires 3GB of RAM to run. Consideration of the needs of applications running on the local machine should be made before allocating RAM drive memory.

Enter an image file name in the Image file field, select a suitable drive letter from the Drive letter drop down list and set the size of the virtual disk in the Size of virtual disk field and click OK. A message window is displayed, click Format disk.

The Format Local Disk window is displayed.

In the Volume Label field enter a label name and click Start. A Warning message is displayed.

Click OK to proceed with the formatting, once the formatting is complete the following message window is displayed.

Using an o/s file browser, navigate to locate the newly mapped drive.

Using the RAM Drive

The ram drive can now be used like any other drive and in this example a DB file ACP7001_0001 has been place on the drive.

In an AVEVA Administration session for any project, the above DB file can be DICE checked using the following command line syntax CHECK FILE /R:\ACP7001_0001:

Modify the RAM Drive

Once the ram drive is selected the functionality available from the window is now available.