RAM Disks are temporary digital storage solutions that are typically 50 to 100 times faster than mechanical HDDs and almost 10 times faster than even the best and fastest SSDs. Using RAM Disks in a PC can theoretically increase performance significantly in terms of read/write speeds. That’s why today we’re going to show you how to create a RAM Disk (sometimes called a RAM Drive) on your Windows 10 computer. We will also tell you more about the technology and its benefits, and show you RAM Disk vs SSD comparisons for a more holistic understanding of the subject.
Create RAM Disk in Windows 10 to Improve PC Performance
For this demo today we will be using a free third-party Windows 10 program called ImDisk Toolkit. However, other such software is available, including AMD Radeon RAMDisk, Dataram RAMDisk, Gavotte RAMDisk, and more. They all have their own pros and cons, but ImDisk is built-in software and is generally considered the standard-bearer for the industry alongside Dataram offerings. So without further chatting, let’s dive right into it and see how we can create a RAM Disk (RAM Drive) on our Windows 10 computers. However, we’ll start with more details about the RAM Disk itself, its benefits, and its comparisons against SSD flash storage devices.
What is RAM Disk?
A RAM disk (also called a RAM Drive) is a part of a computer’s random access memory that is specially reserved by the operating system to be treated as a regular storage drive. When you install a RAM Disk, you can use it as a regular secondary storage drive and even install programs on it. Sometimes referred to as a virtual RAM drive or software RAM drive, it differs from a hardware RAM drive that uses RAM chips to create super-fast battery-powered SSDs.
How Do Ram Disks Compare to SSDs?
A RAM drive’s read/write speeds are generally faster than SSDs, the fastest form of secondary storage available on the market. The performance gain is due to many factors, including access time, maximum transfer rate, and file system type. The biggest gain is the higher maximum throughput, which is limited only by RAM, bus and processor speed when it comes to RAM drives. SS’s, on the other hand, are even more limited by the speed of the storage bus like SATA or USB. Other forms of storage media such as HDDs and Optical drives are even slower due to their higher access times.
RAM Disk and SSD: Comparisons
To measure the difference in read/write speeds between the RAM drive and M.2 SSD in my company-issued laptop, I ran CystalDiskMark 8, the industry standard free tool for benchmarking storage disks. As expected, the fight between RAM Disk and SSD turned into annihilation. While the M.2 drive doesn’t hump, the RAM Drive surpasses it by an order of magnitude. For small amounts of data it is about 7-8 times faster at sequential read speeds and almost 20 times faster at random read speeds. The difference is equally sharp for write speeds, hovering between 5-6 times for sequential and 3-4 times for random.
RAM Disks: Benefits and Disadvantages
In terms of speed advantage, the benefits of RAM Disks are for everyone to see. Technically, programs installed on a RAM drive will have nearly instantaneous load times as their data will be stored in the fastest memory type available. Opening files, viewing documents, and installing games or applications are almost always instant, as their data will only be copied to another part of RAM. However, despite its obvious benefits, there is one major issue that is preventing the RAM Disk cheat from becoming a more widely used tool for people to speed up their heavy-duty computers.
The biggest issue here is that RAM is volatile memory. This means that as soon as the computer is shut down or there is a power outage, all data stored there will be lost. Of course, you can save your RAM Disk data to an image file before each shutdown and reload it on each startup to reduce the problem, but this will increase system startup and shutdown times, thus removing the main point of creating RAM Disks. first place.
RAM disks also reserve a large portion of your memory, which means you can’t use it for anything else. Computers with tons of RAM should be fine, while older or cheaper systems that don’t have much memory might not have a problem. However, all said and done, games and programs installed on RAM disks seem to boot and run much faster than those installed on standard SSDs. This is especially true for programs that don’t normally use RAM as cache and instead save small files to secondary storage.
Hardware RAM Disks
Some super premium SSDs use RAM chips instead of flash for storage, making them much faster than standard solid state drives. These drives contain built-in batteries that allow them to hold data written on them even when the computer is turned off. However, the rising cost of electronics and semiconductor chips means that such storage drives are also significantly more expensive and typically not meant for retail consumers (that would be you and me). Instead, they are for data centers and researchers who may need ultra-fast speeds for mission-critical purposes, whatever the cost.
How to Create RAM Disk in Windows 10?
You can easily create RAM Disks on Windows computers using small and lightweight third-party tools. As mentioned earlier, we use a utility called ‘ImDisk’ to create RAM Disk on our Windows 10 PC. However, you can use other similar software available for free.
Note: The methods described in this article will work on both desktop and laptop computers. I’m also using Windows 10 for this demo, but the methods detailed here will also work on older versions of Windows, including Windows 7,8 and 8.1..
Step 1: Download and Install ImDisk
- First download: IMDisk Toolkit (Free) Compress the file from the developer’s official Sourceforge page and extract the content to a location of your choice. Now open the folder and run the batch file setup.bat.
Note: If prompted by User Account Control (UAC), click or tap ‘Yes’ to confirm. You can also disable annoying UAC prompts to improve your workflow..
- In the installer configuration window, check all the boxes in the ‘Components’ section and then click/tap on it To organise. Your setup will only take a second or two.
Step 2: Use ImDisk to Create a RAM Disk in Windows 10
- Run ImDisk. On the Basic tab [1]Choose RAM size [2] You want to allocate RAM Disk. You can also select the Dynamic Memory feature by checking the ‘Allocate Dynamic Memory’ option. [3]. Leave the rest of the settings as default and click on it. OK [4] To create a RAM Disk.
Note: The Dynamic Memory feature, if selected, allows the size of the RAM disk to change instantly, allocating more space as needed. It is slower but saves a lot of memory when only a small portion of the RAM Disk is used.
- go this computer (My computer is on previous Windows versions) and you will see a new drive with the drive letter and size of your choice. This is your RAM Disk.
- To undo all changes, you can erase the RAM Disk by clicking on it. disconnect Press the button on the Basic tab in the ImDisk configuration window, as seen below.
Step 3: Prevent RAM Disk Data Loss After Every Shutdown
RAM is volatile memory, meaning that every time you shut down your computer, the data on your RAM Disk is automatically deleted. With it, you can save the data contained in the RAM Disk during shutdown and quickly reload it at startup. Here’s how to do it:
- Move to Data tab [1] In the ImDisk configuration window. Now, in the ‘Load Content from Image File or Folder’ field, navigate to (or type) the path to the image file [2] It will be synchronized with automatically saved RAM Disk data at next startup. Make sure you check the ‘Sync on System Shutdown’ option. [3]. click OK [4] done once.
Enjoy Super Fast Read/Write Speeds with RAM Disk on Your Windows 10 PC
Using our tutorial above, you should be able to easily create a RAM Disk to speed up your Windows 10 computer. Check out our guide on how to allocate more RAM to certain apps in Windows 10, since you want to play around with your computer’s RAM configurations to get better performance. Finally, also check out our guides detailing the best Windows 10 tips and tricks and steps you can take to improve battery life on your Windows PC.
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