Ram disk programs

While regular users will benefit from moving web-browser cache and Windows temporary files to a RAM disk, IT professionals may find even more advantages. For example, programmers can speed-up the development process by redirecting intermediate compiler output to a RAM disk, database administrators can improve performance by using a RAM drive for things like tempdb, and so on. Download free trial.

News, releases and latest updates. All software products. General purchasing information Licence types Payment options and refund policy Available discounts. Help and support Knowledge base Forum Contact centre. Key features Any number of RAM disks.

In practice, up to 26 disks due to the number of drive letters available. Any RAM disk size on bit systems. Letting it run would make gHacks opened via https. This is performed with an empty cache. Https at this time is fluid, renders pages as fast as http, and renders them complete.

Amazing service! Thank you! I was surprised to read this article. I thought that RAM disks had gone the way of the dodo, and had been rendered obsolete by modern operating systems as well as the enormous power of contemporary hardware.

Windows 95 era? Maybe there are some specific situations where some very knowledgeable users could still take advantage of such software. I would love to learn more about that. This is far more problematic than the few milliseconds you might save here and there. Generally, wholeheartedly agree. Most modern, mainstream software will make plentiful use of your ram is need be and its available which negates most RAM disk benefits.

And data security outweighs any gains. I have however a niche use case where there are significant benefits. I work as a structural engineer designing buildings.

I am currently working on a building where one floor will house vibration sensitive scientific equipment. I am running a finite element analysis model to look at the impact on the dynamics of modifying a number elements and properties.

Right now I have 18 models to run, each taking hours to run. Turns out the software is fairly niche and as a result its optimisations are far from ideal! The whole thing is mostly single threaded, but can get around that by running multiple instances at once. Issue of data loss is also of low importance as I am copying files from network drive and back again when analysis is complete worst case is a loss of a couple of hours compute time.

Nice application! Great text Martin, thx. Personaly I use commercial RAM disks because of the lack od some important features in above free versions like using unmanaged memory for example. Flyer how those two compare to DimmDrive? Thanks a lot for this overview!

Went to all this work to write this up and not a single benchmark, so sad. You need to use Crystal Disk Mark to get transfer speeds. Hope you can update this article with benchmarks! Running an iK 4. WinRamTech provides now also a free but MB limited version. ImDisk Toolkit is one of these programs. Just look at the advanced tab. I suggest that you consider adding ERAM to this list.

It depends; you may be able to move some game assets to the RAM disk to speed up the loading of certain elements but that depends on the game in question. Fast forward two years since this great article was published in , what are the available and recommended Free RAM drives options as well as their download links?

I read this aticle without being a RAM disk user. So I apologize if this reply will be useless, but few other people will see your post, given that this is many years old. What you describe sounds like a weird bug, especially given that nobody else appears to encouter it. My guess is the Installer is executed by a special system account. Which file system does your RAM disk use? Which size does the RAM disk have?

Junk disappears when you shut down the computer. Finally time has ran out, and sofperfect ramdisk is with a bug for windows 10 latest update and cannot pass the 4GB limit without updating to latest paid version. So you wont need to unmount it for gaming, as long it is not full and with a big chunk of your actual memory.

I am running 32GB sys and have a 28GB drive running on it, stable with only web browser open. Great for large file downloads as VR movies, etc for video editing and then saving down to an external HDD on system shut-down. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Please click on the following link to open the newsletter signup page: Ghacks Newsletter Sign up. Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.

Search for:. Martin Brinkmann. This guide provides you with an overview of the best free RAM Disk programs for devices running Microsoft's Windows operating system. Related content Microsoft says Powerdir vulnerability in macOS could have given attackers access to user data. Avira is adding a crypto miner to its products as well.

Regards, Milan. It would be interesting to see this test done in an AMD and Intel setting as well. Thanks for keeping it up to date. Using it for my Temp folder, Firefox cache and Small pagefile. Some software demands a page file, eg Photoshop CS6 and probably earlier ones. I have 16 GB, and can spare 4GB for a ramdisk containing a pagefile. When you are over 16GB ram you can spare some to send all disk caches there.

Great job on the benchmarks! HAL — The next time ramdisks are evaluated, it would be very helpful if you would include the maximum RAM Disk size allowed by each product. One of my regular tasks is to run scanpst. A RAM disk is the perfect way to speed up this tedious task and it would be nice to know which products can do the job.

For sure it depends on the system. As a sysadmin, it obviously pays for me to install 16 or even 32GB of extra RAM in my machine if it can save me enough time over the life of the investment. By the way, great article. Kudos too, for keeping it updated. Any advice is appreciated!

Buffalo Ramdisk is an interesting piece of software. It is a freeware, pretty fast and supports the OS invisible memory — interesting option for those who still use bit Windows. It can be downloaded from: buffalo. I just wonder why the QSoft Ramdisk is not mentioned. According fiehnlab. Just out of curiosity , I did concurrently benchmark the QSoft and the Dataram ramdisks. The benchmarks were started at quasi the same time within the time to move and click the two start buttons. By this , the benchmarks run concurrently on the disks with the same size and the same filesystem.

I presume this the most accurate test one can perform. Me too. I installed that one shortly after I read that it was updated and is freeware. Fastest RAMdisk software of them all.

And it supports command-line interface :D. What system did you use to test? My Maxxmem Preview scores are below, perhaps you could share yours to compare? Checking the RAMdisk showed that that the folder was now inaccessible and non delete-able and so I had to unmount the RAMdisk and re-mount it now empty to clear that problem. Trying again gave the same result so I gave up on that software. Same procedure had already worked fine with RAMdisk Enterprise but that has a lot more options to set.

My Maxxmem 1. This probably confirms the point about software being the limiting factor, as these scores are much higher which comes through in the sequential and k scores, but your 4k QD32 score is much faster. By that I simply meant the RAMDisk software itself is obviously causing a bottleneck for me somewhere because as you say, my RAM scores are significantly better in Maxxmem.

As a result, you would expect ALL my scores to be better, but for some reason 4k write scores are way behind what yours are…. Ah yes, I see what you mean now. My ImDisk scores compare strangely to yours i. This issue with inaccessible folders has been fixed in the latest build 3. Thank you for your feedback.

Skill RAM. I too am somewhat confused by this, changing the speeds of the RAM, increasing the speeds to stock, tightening the timings and increasing the NB frequancy improved the benchmark but not by that much. At stock: Copy: Read: Write: Score: 6. I could get the timings to T on Mhz which had an increase but it was unstable.

The highest I got it was Mhz on I did a pre and post CPU OC and that had some impact, Mhz more increased my scores slightly so I am wondering if it is the chip holding it back. I wonder if these benchmarks are actually optimised for AMD systems. SoftPerfect have released their RAM disk as freeware and are claiming to have done major optimisations in their product.

I get:Seq: k: k: k qd i Excellent post! I heard you can have your ramdisk saved to a hdd as files or a disk image even iso before shutdown or simultaneously when idling. This could even prevent fragmentation buildup issues caused by small cookies and temp.

I will update as soon as done…. Great test The only one that I know of,actually. Thank you. PS: classical question I guess but does a ram drive allow you to use the totality of the physical Ram available or only what Windows detects Typically,3. Further I have testet the real life performance with several applications Firefox, Photoshop, Gimp, VLC and stopped the time of several processes.

I was wondering how it compared to the other 12 versions you tested. It is not shareware or freeware, but I am still old school and believe you get what you pay for.

Yep, it has happened here also. Secondly, if you have problems to remember small details in how to handle all logs and batch-files, yes maybe there are better solutions to use. Third, it mention how effective it is to clean the disk cache and how much there is to win by clean it. After using it for some time, I can tell that DataRam ram disk has one big disadvantage. I cannot even imagine how can it be so slow on modern machines. Surprised their write speeds are so slow! Second Life is a virtual 3D world you play on line — you can do anything, create anything, meet people, build worlds, play games — all in 3D photo realistic graphics.

This information is not only useful for gaming, but for any computationally intensive process — video processing, graphics rendering, etc. For now I stay with superspeed ramdisk. Well you have done it again. Another very nice article about something, most everyday users may not know properly about.