# Using Excel in Ramdisk



## yanke_zulu (Sep 22, 2012)

i want to use ramdisk for huge excell files
do i need to have performance gain using such files n ramdisk?
or shoukd i need to install Ms Excel in Ramdisk to have perfornance gain?


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## ShiBDiB (Sep 22, 2012)

Why not just buy an ssd?


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## yanke_zulu (Sep 22, 2012)

looking for a temporary solution while i am working on excell files


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## W1zzard (Sep 22, 2012)

only way is to try.. grab one of the free ramdisk softwares out there.

if your excel files have so many entries that excel is slow then you should use a real database engine


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## Frogger (Sep 22, 2012)

it's an old thread but still fulll of info  http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=107670


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## yanke_zulu (Sep 22, 2012)

why i am gettong indirect answers guys, 
how can i use excell file on ramdisk , do i need to onstall excell or not?


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## W1zzard (Sep 22, 2012)

excel will load your whole xls file into memory and work with it in memory, so the ramdisk wont probably do anything.

if you install excel itself to ramdisk the program will just start faster
if you put your xls file on the ramdisk it will load the file faster but probably not work with it any faster.

you are using the 64-bit version of excel, right?


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## yanke_zulu (Sep 23, 2012)

yes, i am using 64 bit excell

using excell file on ramdisc should have some difference, i would open excell file faster because of reading speed, 
changing the file also takes so much time, so i assume writing speed would decrease such time

is there ant temp file does excell use for calculations?


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## Kreij (Sep 23, 2012)

Hi Yanke, and welcome to TPU 

RAM is volatile, which means when you start your computer the image of the RAMdisk will have to be reloaded from the HDD. Once it is loaded, though, access will be much faster.

Putting the application itself in a RAMDisk is not going to buy you much. Once the OS loads the app from the HDD it's in RAM anyway. The same is true for the xls files.
You will get better loading times and also write times, but eventually you will have to write the data back to a non-volatile store so you don't lose it when power is shut off.

There are 3rd party, non-volitale cards that will retain what's in their RAM, but they are usually much more expensive than a comparible SSD.

As for calculations, the processor is reading (and writing) everything from RAM already, so a RAMDisk will not help you there as it's using it's working set in RAM and not the RAMDisk. If the file(s) are so large that the OS generates page faults (needs the pagefile) it's going to be using the HDD anyway. The only real way to speed up the calculations is to get a faster processor (or if the application is optimized for multi-core/threading a proc with more cores) or faster RAM (I doubt you would notice a difference with faster RAM as even standard RAM is blazing fast compared to all the other peripherals).

Your best option, as stated before, is to get an SSD. I don't think that an interim/temporary solution is going to be worth the effort.

Just my opinions.


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## sbalhara (Oct 22, 2014)

As my 2c, Storing an excel file in RAM disk was* consistently* faster for me versus hard disk


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## AsRock (Oct 23, 2014)

If only more things could rise from the dead ( no pun intended ).


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