RAM Disk is a technology where you use your computer’s memory, or RAM, and make it into a virtual hard disk drive. People do that because the speed of RAM is so much faster than anything else, including SSD’s, for most kinds of storage and files on a RAM disk can be accessed much more quickly. Another factor is the current generation of RAM (DDR3) is pretty affordable nowadays and most modern computers have at the very least 2GB to 4GB of memory which very rarely gets fully utilized.
Ever get annoyed at how long it takes to run Adobe Photoshop? Even after using Firefox for a long time, you’ll notice that the browser starts to crawl. Well if you install and load Firefox database files in RAM Disk, it should definitely help the time that it takes to startup be 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.
Here’s a selection of 12 RAM Disk software programs for you to try out and many of them are unlimited freeware, or have only slightly reduced functions and only a few are full shareware. After a little research and testing on the RAM Disk software, it was noticed that some perform faster by giving a faster read and write speed even when working on the same memory. We believe it’s how the RAMdisk driver is being coded and optimized that makes a difference on the performance of the software.
We will be using a free portable utility called CrystalDiskMark, a very popular disk benchmark software to do the test on a clean Windows 7 32bit computer with service pack 1 and all latest hotfixes. 1GB DDR3 (1600MHz) x 2 is in use on the desktop computer. As a standard, a 500MB or 512MB drive will be created on every RAMDisk software if it allows us to. Then we’ll will use the default CrystalDiskMark benchmark settings only changing the test size option to 100MB and then run a test on the RAMdisk space.
We’ve tried running the test a few times and the result is always different to some small degree but the scores are extremely close. CrystalDiskMark itself actually runs each test with 5 passes so the numbers running the test once are a good average. The numbers that matter the most are the 4K tests in the third and forth rows of the screenshots. Higher is better. All RAMDisk’s were formatted with the NTFS filesystem.
7200RPM 500GB hard drive without using RAM Disk.
1. Gizmo Drive 2.7.9, part of Gizmo Central (Freeware)
2. Bond Disc 1.0.4.0 (Free for personal use)
The maximum RAM disk limit is 640MB
3. Gilisoft RAMDisk 4.7 (Shareware $40 USD)
4. Primo Ramdisk Standard Edition 5.6.0 (Direct IO) (Shareware $29.95 USD)
5. SuperSpeed RamDisk 11.6 (Shareware $60 USD)
6. Dataram RAMDisk 4.0.0 (Freeware)
The freeware version has a limit of 4GB per RAM disk.
7. VSuite Ramdisk Free Edition 1.18.1531.1240 (SCSI) (Freeware)
This Free version only works on Windows 2000, 2003 and XP.
8. ImDisk 1.5.6 (Freeware)
9. Gavotte Ramdisk 1.1.0 (Freeware)
10. SoftPerfect RAM Disk 3.3.1 (Freeware)
11. Passmark OSFMount 1.5 (Freeware)
12. StarWind Software Virtual RAM Drive Emulator 5.5 (Freeware)
This RAM disk supports sizes of up to 1 GB.
As you can see, there are some quite large differences even just between the free versions. The best free RAMDisk software in terms of raw performance is Bond Disc, but the program is partly an encryption application which isn’t easy to use, has a 640MB RAM disk limit, and also the graphical interface isn’t great. Recently Softperfect have have made their previous $29 shareware RAMDisk software into freeware, and some major updates have brought massive improvements in performance, between 5 and 9 times faster in the 4K scores! Now well worth looking at.
Gavotte Ramdisk also performs pretty good for a freeware utility, and Dataram RAMDisk gives a fairly solid if unspectacular performance.
excellent article, thank you!
the SoftPerfect RAM disk works very well here, much faster than Dataram
cheers!
This software is only in German language: ArchiCrypt Ultimate RAM-Disk 3
QSoft RAMDisk has no good installer and somethings you have to do manualy, it also freezes my Windows Explorer and have to restart it, with an decent installer & unstaller I would give it a try again.
Still dont now whitch one to install altough SoftPerfect RAM Disk 3.3.1 (Freeware) seems to be fast and the second SoftPerfect RAM Disk 3.3.1 (Freeware) looks also interesting.
Any advice is appriciated!
the second choice would be: Gavotte Ramdisk 1.1.0 (Freeware)
Buffalo Ramdisk is an interesting piece of software. It is a freeware, pretty fast and supports the OS inivisible memory – initeresting option for those who still use 32-bit Windows.
It can be downloaded from:
buffalo.jp/download/driver/memory/ramdisk.html
or it can be downloaded as a part of buffalo external drive utility pack:
buffalo-technology.com/en/download_file.php?r=8308
You “missed” ArchiCrypt Ramdisk: archicrypt.de/archicrypt_ultimate_ram_disk.html
I just wonder why the QSoft Ramdisk is not mentioned. According fiehnlab.ucdavis.edu/staff/kind/Collector/Benchmark/RamDisk/ramdisk-benchmarks.pdf , that one is the fastest.
Although that looks like a very thorough test, judging by the versions of the software used, I believe it’s around 3 years old and so wildly out of date. You can’t place any relevance in those benchmarks because just about all RAMDisks tested have been updated at least once since then and that can make a BIG difference to performance.
As to why QSoft Ramdisk isn’t included, we simply can’t and have no intention of testing every single piece of RAMDisk software out there. There’s a fair selection of free and commercial products included already and if one of them needs to be replaced, Qsoft will certainly be considered.
Just out of curiosity , I did concurrently benchmark the QSoft and the Dataram ramdisks.
System : dual Xeon with 16 GB RAM — Windows 8 Pro – 64 bit
B:\ Qsoft ramdisk – 3072 GB – FAT32
E:\ Dataram – 3072 MB ( because of the 4GB restriction ) – FAT32
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.
The result can be found here : dl.free.fr/cwU0mefFI/benchmark3072.jpg
It shows that the QSoft ramdisk is “just” a bit faster in almost all test cases , although , the differences are minimal.
SoftPerfect RAM Disk 64-bit works perfectly for me on Win7 64.
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
SoftPerfect RAM Disk 64-bit works perfectly for me on Win7 64.
i use a Phenom II X4 965 with 16GB DDR3 @1333Mhz
my Dawn of wars are copied in 20 seconds, and then its blazingly fast loaded ;)
Thanks Raymond!!!
Here`s my results for Primo Ramdisk Pro, ImDisk, BondDisc and Gilisoft Ramdisk.
http://i46.tinypic.com/2hdb6hl.jpg
What system did you use to test? On my Phenom II X4 955 with 16GB DDR3 @1333Mhz, my Seq and 512k speeds are about half yours, although I more or less matched the other scores and exceeded your best 4k QD32 Write speed by a large amount (813 MB/s). I tested with DataRAM RAMdisk, RAMdisk Enterprise and Bond Disc. My Maxxmem Preview scores are below, perhaps you could share yours to compare?
Copy 10466 MB/s
Read 8107 MB/s
Write 6831 MB/s
Score 7.47GB/s
Latency 66.9 ns
Oh, I also tried the SoftPerfect RAMdisk and was able to create a 10GB NTFS RAMdisk but whilst copying a folder to it, it said it was unable to continue as the files were corrupt. 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
@ doveman: As I said up in the article, these tools appear to be heavily influenced by the way they’re coded which is why there sometimes seems to be big differences between software and also systems. My Maxxmem 1.99 scores are below:
Copy 21168 MB/s
Read 19418 MB/s
Write 18784 MB/s
Score 18.10 GB/s
Latency 52.4 ns
This probably confirms the point about software being the limiting factor, as these scores are much higher which comes through in the sequential and 512k scores, but your 4k QD32 score is much faster.
Update: DataRAM and Softperfect benchmarks have been updated for versions 4 and 3.3.1 respectively.
I’m not sure what you mean by software being the limiting factor but clearly your RAM speeds are 2-3 times faster than mine (which seems typical for modern Intel compared to AMD systems) and this is why your RAMdisks are also 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. It does seem that the RAMDisk software isn’t taking full advantage of your RAM speeds when it comes to 4k speeds, as your Seq and 512k scores are about double mine in all the tests but your best 4k and 4k QD32 scores are about the same as I got with RAMDisk Enterprise, except for the 4k QD32 write, which I exceeded considerably.
My ImDisk scores compare strangely to yours (i.e. exceed all your 4k scores considerably) as well as you can see from these screenshots:
This is a 10GB NTFS IMDisk:
imageshack.us/photo/my-images/16/imdisk10gbntfscdm.png/
and this is a 10GB NTFS IMDisk using awealloc:
imageshack.us/photo/my-images/407/10gbawealloccdm.png/
I did test with CDM x64 though, so perhaps that’s worth you trying to see if it makes any difference.
Which memory, processor and montherboard you used? Can I ask it?
This issue with inaccessible folders has been fixed in the latest build 3.2.2. Thank you for your feedback.
I’ve got a Phenom X4 965 and getting similar scores as you on my G.Skill RAM. I’ve got 16Gb of it running in dual channel mode (it’s stock is 1600mhz but it’s at 1333).
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: 10149
Read: 7924
Write: 6621
Score: 6.30
Latency 72.6 (units are the same as above)
I could get the timings to 7-7-7-21-2T on 1333Mhz which had an increase but it was unstable. The highest I got it was 1600Mhz on 8-9-8. I did a pre and post CPU OC and that had some impact, 600Mhz 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. What is anyone’s experience?
@ Wallaby: I have just rerun the test for the Softperfect freeware version and it’s MUCH quicker than the old shareware version :) Will hopefully upload the benchmark screenshot within the next 24hrs….
The problem with Bond Disc is that it cannot create RAM disks larger than 640 MB.
buffalo.jp/products/catalog/memory/speedup/ramdisk.html
Found another piece of RAM Disk software from Japan.
thanks man. very clear and straightforward
keep it up
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.