# Ram drive or SSD for transcoding? **URL:** \ **Category:** General Discussions\ **Created:** [September 23, 2019, 7:15pm UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/ram-drive-or-ssd-for-transcoding/465730 "2019-09-23T19:15:59Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 8
**Author:** ![TeknoJunky](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/plex/user_avatar/forums.plex.tv/teknojunky/32/165055_2.png) [@TeknoJunky](https://forums.plex.tv/u/TeknoJunky)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2019, 2:14am UTC](https://forums.plex.tv/t/ram-drive-or-ssd-for-transcoding/465730/8 "2019-09-24T02:14:14Z")
Oh I am not denying the efficiency of it, I am simply saying that any modern hard drive, that is not already overloaded, has plenty of iops to cover any plex transcoding tasks. If a hard drive can not keep up with whatever any servers load of users/transcodes, then there are bigger problems at play. Otherwise, the main bottlenecks will be either the internet bandwidth between server/client, and the server cpu (or gpu) in older/under powered servers (ie trying to serve too many users, or trying to decode HEVC). Your OS, regardless of windows/linux, will have disk caching for the transcoder, which will automatically absorb the io of transcoding and other io loads. There is a few old thread here on this forum which tested transcoding to ram extensively. > [@Plex Transcoding on RAMDisk](https://forums.plex.tv/t/plex-transcoding-on-ramdisk/42229): > > Hey all,   I just recently stumbled on an article that made me feel like I was back in 1994 again and it was about RAMDisk's and how much faster they are than SSD's.  I decided to try it out and indeed the RAMDisk I made benchmarked at over 5 GB/s read and 6 GB/s write speeds (my SSD's get 250+ MB/s).  It got me thinking, I have this home media server with an abundance of extra RAM (32 GB total) and I'd like to find a way to utilize that.  Then I was wondering what exactly I'd do with a RAMDis… > [@Would RAMDisk provide better performance for transcoding then HDD as I don't have an SSD on my server?](https://forums.plex.tv/t/would-ramdisk-provide-better-performance-for-transcoding-then-hdd-as-i-dont-have-an-ssd-on-my-server/378236): > > I only had an HDD and no SSD on my online dedicated server. Would I have better transcoding performance if I use RAMDisk as an SDD alternative? for starters --- _[View the full topic](https://forums.plex.tv/t/ram-drive-or-ssd-for-transcoding/465730)._