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Speed Up Disk Intensive Applications with a RAM Drive

If your computer has some RAM to spare, RAM drives are perfect for increasing the performance of any application that must read and write a lot of data. Using a special kernel mode driver along with system memory, a temporary RAM drive can be created that is significantly faster than traditional storage. Spindle based hard drives found in almost every computer have a maximum read and write speed of around 100 MB per second. The performances of RAM drives are only limited by the speed of the memory and chipset. That results in read and writes speeds well above 1 GB per second and on high end systems much faster.

There are a lot of different ways to create a RAM drive. The method that I’m going to show you will use a free utility called RAMDisk that will allow you to create a RAM drive up to 4GB (assuming you have more than 4GB of RAM in your PC).

First, download and install the latest version of Dataram RAMDisk.

Then click on the Start Button and launch the RAMDisk Configuration Utility

On the Settings tab specify the Disk Size and the partition type.

Then click Start RAMDisk and your drive will be ready for use in Windows Explorer listed next to the other storage devices on your computer.

The main problem with RAM drives is the non-persistent nature of the disk. Turn off your computer and the contents of the RAM drive will be gone forever.  The Dataram RAMDisk utility has a helpful feature that will allow you to save the state of your RAM drive upon shutting down and loading an image of it, from a file on your hard drive, on startup to restore any data. You can find these settings on the Load and Save tab of the RAMDisk Configuration Utility.

Now that you have your RAM drive setup and running try moving the Internet Explorer Temporary Internet files to speed up web browsing or redirect any other disk intensive application to use the RAM drive.

 
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Comments
Andrey de Oliveira
IMDisk is another tiny cool app to create ramdisk, mount iso and nrg images, raw hard disk and floppy disks images like make with dd or winimage. This app emulate cd, floppy and hd.
93 days ago
Doug
Isn't this what Vista and Win 7's Readyboost feature supposed to do?
92 days ago
Larry Miller
As a rule a RAM Drive is not a good use of memory. A RAM Drive requires that a substantial amount of memory be devoted to the drive, even if it is not currently being used, even if the memory is better used for other uses. The system cache provides most of the advantages of a RAM Drive without the disadvantages. There are some legitimate uses for a RAM Drive but not many. Windows 7 is very good at managing memory on it's own. In spite of what Task Manager might seem to be telling you, very little memory is free and unused.
86 days ago
WarBeast
At last the best programm for Win 7 !!!
82 days ago
pilotavery@gmail.com
@Doug

no. readyboost uses virtual memory (paging file) on a flash drive instead of hard drive.

hard drive will work too much
78 days ago
Vlad
This kind of utility is very useful if you have a huge amount of RAM. For example, all gamers of online games have an great possibility to reduce redraw time on teleport locations, such as Lineage II. Of cause game can be 8 or 10 Gb in size and therefore huge amount of RAM is needed. It's not a big problem nowadays - mainstream motherboard support up to 16 or 32 Gb. The last question to decide is the price ;)

Readyboost is useful if you have flashdrive with speed to read at least 15 MB/s. I've tried ordinary flashdrive with 8MB\s read speed and didn't notice any difference. And it is supposed to speed up you start-up time only. W7 is starting fast enough. I didn't see the reason to use it.
69 days ago
blue
Believe it or not, *sometimes* Microsoft really *does* know what it is doing, and this is one of those cases. Don't you think, if ram disks were useful, that MS would've built this feature in? They didn't because windows makes better use of RAM than for this.
68 days ago
docster
Jeez, blue.... I suggest you see your physician ASAP for an inoculation against sycophancy.... *winks*
49 days ago
 
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