RAM Disk is a technology where you use your computer’s memory (or some people call it RAM) and make it into a virtual hard disk drive. People do that because the speed of RAM is so much faster for most kinds of storage and files on a RAM disk can be accessed much more quickly. Another factor is RAM are pretty affordable nowadays and most modern computers have at least 2 to 4GB of memory which we’ll never fully utilize. Ever get annoyed on how long it takes to run Adobe Photoshop? Even after using Firefox for a long time, you’ll notice that the best browser starts to crawl. Well if you install and load it in RAM Disk, I strongly believe that the time that takes to startup will definitely cut down by a lot. All you need to do is to install the software on the drive that is created with RAMDisk or if it is a database, set the program to load the database from the RAMDisk.
I have found 12 RAM Disk software with most of them are shareware and only a few that is free. After a little research and testing on the RAM Disk software, I noticed that some performs faster by giving a faster read and write speed even when working on the same memory. I believe how the RAMdisk driver is being coded and optimized makes a difference on the performance of the software.
I will be using CrystalDiskMark, a very popular disk benchmark software to do the test on a clean Windows XP computer with service pack 3 and all latest hotfixes. I have 1GB DDR2 (333MHz) x 3 installed on my desktop computer. As a standard, I will create 500MB on every RAMDisk software if it allows me to. Then I will use the default CrystalDiskMark benchmark settings to test on the RAMdisk space. I’ve tried running the test a few times and the result I get is always different but they are very close. The number that matters the most is the 4K test which is at the third row of the screenshots. Higher is better.
7200RPM hard drive without using RAM Disk.
1. Qsoft RAMDrive Enterprise 5.3.1.11 (Shareware $10 USD)
2. Virtual Hard Drive 2 Pro (Shareware $29.99 USD)
3. Gilisoft RAMDisk 3.2 (Shareware $19.96 USD)
4. VSuite Ramdisk Standard Edition 4.3.4127.1603 (Direct IO) (Shareware $29.95 USD)
5. SuperSpeed RamDisk 10.0.1 (Shareware $39.95 USD)
6. Dataram RAMDisk 3.5.130 (Freeware)
7. VSuite Ramdisk Free Edition 1.16.2127.1603 (SCSI) (Freeware)
8. ImDisk 1.1.6 built 7 (Freeware)
9. Gavotte RRamdisk (Freeware)
10. SoftPerfect RAM Disk 1.0.1 (Free Beta)
11. Power RAMDisk 2.80 (Shareware $9.95 USD)
12. DiskBoost 2.0 (Shareware $49.95 USD)
Note: Can only create FAT and FAT32 drive (NTFS not possible). Blue screen of death crash occur when try to test read and write speed with CrystalDiskMark.
The last two is a failed RAM Disk product and they’re charging money for it! If you want to use RAMDisk software for free, go for Dataram RAMDisk. If you’re willing to buy it, then choose either one from the top 3 because they all have similar results.
Related posts:
With imdisk on my system (windows 7 64 with 12 GB of DDR3 1600 8-8-8-24 CR1 ram and a core i7 950 at 4.2 ghz)
I get:Seq: 5830 7990512k: 5756 74744k: 1004 8644k qd32: 2020 1537
i55.tinypic.com/1y91y8.jpg
Excellent post! i keep it with DATARAM RAMdisk, which have the fastest read/write operations reported.
Thanks Ray.
oh, and its free up to 4 Geebees..
louis!
simple:YES
sophisticated:if your bios sees 4 gigs and your 32bit OS those 3.2-3.5(???)gigs you can use the rest for ramdisk. XP creates a pagefile even if not needed, so my estimate is: use 1GB for RamDisk and put page and temp+temporary internet there. 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.inet.files! and still spare your data usage when mobile or speeding up browser startup when having a bunch of tabs open.
I’m even considering somehow setting ramdisk as the default pagefile drive, but setting XP not to use one – XP will still use one, but not the equivalent amount of physical RAM, just around 0.3-0.5 GB, but it’s just guesswork yet, cause I didn’t really bother trying it out yet.
I will update as soon as done….
Great test (The only one that I know of,actually).
But question:why is everyone focusing on the Dataram solution when it’s only occupies the… sixth position in the benchmark ?
No feedback on the Qsoft RAMDrive Enterprise by any chance ?
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,3.2 GB on a 32 bits system when 4 GB are truly installed) ?
I Have tested Dataram RAMdisk with a 1GB Ramdisk. My result also much lower (300MB/s). Further I have testet the real life performance with several applications (Firefox, Photoshop, Gimp, VLC) and stopped the time of several processes. Result: the Ramdisk is not faster than my hard disk (Seagate, 60MB/s), often even slower.
I didn’t test the other Ramdisk programs, but Dataram is not worth the time to install…
I’m impressed by those scores. My CrystalMark score using a 5GB ramdrive created with DataRAM’s product was much lower, only 90MB/s. Could it be that I need to tweak the setting somehow?
Raymond,
Have you tried out SuperSpeed’s RamDisk (or RamDiskPlus) software? 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. The SuperSpeed version supports up to 512 GB of RAM disk, which is the sort of capability I need. Most of the others I’ve looked at only support “small” RamDisks. THANKS!
Nice post..
Exciteing see how much faster it is useing the potential of the memory’s. Imagine this can become a big hit and good complement for other alternatives in a near future.
Yep, it has happened here also.
DataRam has’nt been that successful all times in my experience either when load and particularly save the image down to disk. It has a feature for load the image to RAM when booting up but I have’nt noticed yet it work.
For instance the process can’t work when having explorer.exe running orelse it wont save and stop.
CleanMem I’ve tried too but have decided to not use it as it don’t have any GUI which makes it simple to use it.
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 winn by clean it.
That’s a myth, it wont make your computer faster in all situations out there.
After using it for some time, I can tell that DataRam ram disk has one big disadvantage. The Save/Load option is painfully slow. By slow I mean SLOW. I cannot even imagine how can it be so slow on modern machines.
Besides this, the product is OK – no crashes until now.
OMG !
You ARE GREAT!
I’ve been testing Flash Drive sticks using Crystal DiskMark and have found suprising results. Suprised 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.
Pumping all that graphics through high bandwidth to a fast CPU and even faster ATI or NVIDIA card is AMAZING!
BUT,
The Hard Drive is the slowest part of the whole system. Even with large amounts of GDDR5 graphics RAM, the virtual world viewer must cache data to the hard drive.
But now, I can use the RAMDisk from DataRAM,
and it is one of the fastest and FREE!
memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk/download-ramdisk
THANK YOU !
Thanks for testing each one of these RAM Disks, and publishing a great article.
This information is not only useful for gaming, but for any computationally intensive process – video processesing, graphics rendering, etc.
Good Job!
i just tested my ramdisk from vsuite (little bit newer version), and numbers are higher :)
yfrog.com/izvsuiteramdiskp
excellent report. I am using ImDisk as it is the only free one valid for xp64 (DataRAM & VSuite are 32b only) nb, ImDisk 1.2.4 – much faster now, 4k R/W = 425.7/409.9
If only DataRam support unmanaged RAM (3.2GB-4GB) on 32bit OS. For now I stay with superspeed ramdisk.
good idea for RAM disk. I used to play with RAM disk during my Win 2K times and now its time to revisit this type of software on my 4GB PC as things are slowing down a lot.
Well you have done it again. Another very nice article about something, most everyday users may not know properly about. Had gotten bored seeing the same screen for the last few days.
Welcome back, with a nicely written article.
Good review, Raymond!
@Sputnik: I’ve already posted about CleanMem more than a year ago ;)
raymond.cc/blog/easily-reduce-memory-usage-on-all-running-processes-in-windows/
Thank you very much Raymond and welcome back !
I did not yet tried this software (Dataram RAMDisk, the best free in your survey), but I will surely very soon…
I think that this may give very significative results…
May I suggest that this technology should be used in conjunction with another very good software that a friend of yours talked about on his own website ?
This friend is Ashraf and his website is dotTech[.org], as you know…
The software I’m talking about is CleanMem and it is maybe one of the few, if not the only one, software which is really freeing RAM.
I have settled the automatic launch of this software each minute and this is very transparent.
I just have a 1Gb RAM and with the use of CleanMem, the average use of the RAM is only about 28%, which is very much less than that it was before.
That will allow to give a little more space for the size of the virtual hard disk drive…
Thank you again very much !!! :-)
wow. nice post raymond. myb i’ll try it later. thanks for sharing.
very cool ray, thx.
Welcome back Ray, nice post too btw
great tool , welcome back , raymond , we miss u , happy merry christmas in advance to you and to your family.,,,,,,,
#Hi Raymond!
Thanks for sharing this good tip.
Exciteing see how much faster it is useing the potential of the memory’s. Imagine this can become a big hit and good complement for other alternatives in a near future.
Impressing!
Nowaday’s it’s a cool trend among many to improve pc’s, together with as much memory they possible can..But how many has the knowledge in how to use it? instead of just have a bunch of GB installed memory in a passive way.
Then this solution is a very good alt.
One question; May there be any difference between the results if have the RAM software installed on a FAT32 or NTFS or unformated disk? Could see that you have been testing different types of disk’s, both removable and hd.
Might it have some impact?
Nice to be back on the track. Now you introduced again another special tools and I think it will be very useful for my laptop.
WB Raymond!!!
Tell me, please,you know something about some free KIS 2010 licenses? I need desperately one!!!
I´ve one question, does it means that the database of the applications you load in RAM Disk will be deleted, so that if I run Firefox the changes in i.e my bookmarks would not be saved?
Btw interesting stuff
Welcome Back Mr. Raymond !!!
As always, good article.
Best wishes and awaiting news from your X-Ray project…
Welcome back Ray!!
Miss you man, I was tired of seeing the same X-Ray L4D announcment every day. ^^ Great tip, installing RAMDisk right away…
This is very useful test…
Thank you..
welcome back my friend. Thanks a lot for this new post.
Good post ray. Feeling good to see you bach here.
Welocme back Reymond.
I missed your valuable expertise & tips.
You are doing great job man. Keep it up.
thanks ray
Eh? I don’t get it how to use this. I got dataram RAMDisk but on how many MB do I set it? I got 4gb ram. I tried to read the faq and manual but they don’t explain why I should use this and how many MB.
Hi,
Welcome back.
Best regards !
@Satyajit: As usual, I am just sharing what I was looking for and what I learned.
Thank you for this good Test Raymond!
I like ramdiscs and, many tools are new for me.
After a long time this comes from you
Good luck
@mewah: This will not speed up your PC but speed up a software that uses a lot of read and write on your hard drive.
OMG Raymond!!! Do u know how valuable your ‘benchmarking’ article like this one??? You’re so cool man.. I love ur work.. Keep it up.. :) Thanks
welcome back…
will this actually speed up my pc noticeably?
There are many nice tools at crystalmark.info
Thanks
jezee mate, missed your useful tips and info and now that you are back, let’s rock, cheers!
I am glad to see you again on the site.welcome back.
welcome back..
nice tools..:)
Welcome back. Good to read your insights again.
Welcome back, I have missed your very valuable expertise. Thanks for this update, looks great. Keep it up.