Ramdisk

RamDisk as a virtual hard drive that uses part of your RAM. To the Operating System and applications it appears as a normal physical hard drive. These drives are very fast, much faster than any mechanical or SSD hard drives. Unfortunately they have very limited use because of two reasons:

1. RAM is much more expensive than any hard drive, even an SSD
2. All data stored on a RAM drive is lost if computer is shut down or loses power

Uses

People find various uses for such drives, such as storing temporary internet files, history, temp windows and application files, etc. Not sure there is much of a performance boost in doing this, but nothing stops you from trying.

I was interested to use a RAM Disk when testing speed of various external media and drives. There is a clear benefit in doing this: when you normally do a read or write speed test, you copy data from and to you internal hard drive to an external media. Even when internal hard drive is much faster than an external one, the results may be distorted because of internal drive fragmentation, system activity reading other data, etc. RamDrive is super-fast and is not used for anything else therefore results are much more accurate.

That’s an example: I did a 16GB Lexar SD card speed test using an internal HDD and then using a ramdisk. Test involved copying about 150 JPG files (200MB) from and to the card. With HDD, read times varied between 13 and 35 seconds, with ramdisk it was a constant 9 seconds. Write times were 27 to 33 seconds with HDD and constant 27 seconds with the ramdisk.

Software

After a quick search online, I found a few free and paid drivers and applications to install ramdisks. Problem is that majority are very old and don’t work on Windows 7 (some refer to Windows 2000 as the latest Windows OS!), some have various limitations, such as 64MB disk size, etc.

I tested a few and the best I found was this one:

It’s a driver with a simple GUI which allows to install / uninstall driver and map a drive letter for your RAM disk. I couldn’t find an official website, only references in various forums and newsgroups. The software seems to be free, the driver apparently was written by Gavotte and the GUI by lyh728. So thanks to them whoever they are. I scanned files with various antivirus packages – they came up as clean, but download and use it at your own risk!

Although the software seems to be pretty old it worked well Windows 7 32 bit machine (must run Administrator). Haven’t tried on 64 bit OS, so if you try let me know whether it works or not.

Usage is very simple

• Download ramdisk.zip and extract all file to any folder.
• Right click on ramdisk.exe and select Run as Administrator
• Click Install Ramdisk
• Select Disk Size and Drive Letter and then click Apply
• After a few seconds you should get a message “Success” and the ramdisk will appear in your list of Hard Drives