Sunday, November 13, 2011

Making a RAM Disk - Turning RAM into a Hard Drive!

I was browsing around the Internet, as I spend most of my time, and I discovered the idea of a RAM disk. A RAM disk a section of your computers RAM that, through software, is being accessed as if it were a disk drive. The benefit of this is the increase in speed RAM can provide over a hard drive.

To do this I needed some software and after a few quick Google searches I can across a program called RAMDisk from DataRam.com. Their free version of the program allows for up to 4GB of RAM to be assigned as a drive letter on your computer. Now currently in my computer I only have 4GB of RAM so this program would work for me just find.

The program was very easy to set up. After downloading and installing it I launched it and selected the size of the drive I wanted to create and then I selected why type of formatting I wanted. After that I created my RAM disk and was able to access it in Windows Explorer.
DiskRAM - Making a 1GB RAM Drive

1GB RAM Drive
The speeds of the drive were very impressive. I used a free program called CrystalDiskMark to speed test the sequential read and write speeds of the drive. I was getting speed results of around 2.4GB/s. Which is well over the average of 76MB/s I was getting with my SATA II hard drive.
SATA II Hard Drive Sequential Read/Write Speeds

RAMDisk Drive Sequential Read/Write Speeds

This software also has many neat features like saving the RAM drive to your hard drive when you turn off the computer and loading it back when you turn it on. This is some great software and I am happy to have such a fast RAM Drive! Now to get more RAM, XD.

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