12 RAM Disk Software Benchmarked for Fastest Read and Write Speed
Author: Raymond8 Dec
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.
[tags]ramdisk, memory, speed, benchmark, ramdrive[/tags]
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WB Raymond!!!
Tell me, please,you know something about some free KIS 2010 licenses? I need desperately one!!!
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.
#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?
great tool , welcome back , raymond , we miss u , happy merry christmas in advance to you and to your family.,,,,,,,
Welcome back Ray, nice post too btw
very cool ray, thx.
wow. nice post raymond. myb i’ll try it later. thanks for sharing.
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 !!! :-)
@Sputnik: I’ve already posted about CleanMem more than a year ago ;)
http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2008/09/28/easily-reduce-memory-usage-on-all-running-processes-in-windows/
Good review, Raymond!
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 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.
If only DataRam support unmanaged RAM (3.2GB-4GB) on 32bit OS. For now I stay with superspeed ramdisk.
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
i just tested my ramdisk from vsuite (little bit newer version), and numbers are higher :)
http://yfrog.com/izvsuiteramdiskp
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!
http://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!
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.
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.
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.