What is faster than an SSD Hard Drive? The answer is RAM – virtual disk software, by loading most of your frequently used data onto your RAM makes your computer even faster, much faster than SSD when it comes to loading applications and playing games. As shown in the screen shot, I have 16GB of RAM installed onto my system and with Dota 2, Adobe Photoshop and Mozilla Firefox browser running in the background, my system consumes approximately 35% of the 16GB.
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If you have this much RAM sitting ideal all the time, why not use it to your advantage by boosting your system? Third party software allows you to load most Windows systems and files onto your RAM, together with your frequently run software. RAMDisk is a program that takes a portion of your system memory and uses it as a disk drive. The more RAM your computer has, the larger the RAMDisk you can create.
For those that are confused, this is not the default ‘ReadyBoost’ found in Microsoft Windows operating system. ReadyBoost is about creating additional cache with USB Flash Drive, whereas these software are about loading your frequently used files and software onto your ample RAM system, making it even faster, even faster than your SSD. How much faster than an SSD when you load all your files onto your RAM Memories? 10 times faster reading and writing speed than your SSD, and 50 times faster than your HDD.
1. Dataram RAMDisk
1GB Free | 32GB USD15 | 64GB USD20
What is RAMDisk? RAMDisk is a program that takes a portion of your system memory and uses it as a disk drive. The more RAM your computer has, the larger the RAMDisk you can create. What is the benefit? In a word: SPEED! The performance of a RAMDisk, in general, is orders of magnitude faster than other forms of storage media, such as an SSD (up to 100X) and hard drive (up to 200X). Works great on Microsoft Windows 10. RAMDisk is ideal for:
- Web server cache
- Audio and Video editing
- CAD programs
- Software compilers
- Gamers especially LAN parties for Dota / Counter Strike
- Databases
- 3D Rendering
2. Primo Ramdisk
USD30 for Personal – USD120 for Server
Primo Ramdisk is the second generation of VSuite Ramdisk product ( Download VSuite Ramdisk Free Edition 32-bit only ). It brings new features and improved performance, as well as a friendlier user interface. As VSuite Ramdisk did, Primo Ramdisk also provides a solution to speed up your computer by overcoming current hard disk bottleneck issues.
It allows you to emulate hard disks using available physical memory. Because the access speed of physical memory is so much faster than most kinds of storage, this greatly speeds up your computer with reduced access time to files, which in turn, shows a huge improvement in overall performance.
Disk Features
- Supports ramdisk, hybrid-disk, and file-disk.
- Supports SCSI disk, Direct-IO disk.
- Supports one-time virtual disk.
- Supports up to 128 virtual disks.
Memory Features
- Supports Dynamic Memory Management (DMM).
- Supports Unified Invisible Memory Management Interface (UIMMI).
- Supports to access memory above 4 GB.
File System Features
- Supports FAT/FAT32/NTFS file systems.
- Supports user-defined cluster size.
- Supports user-defined volume label, serial number and drive letter.
- Supports user-defined folders.
- Supports user-defined NTFS file system settings (compression, indexing, and permission).
3. AMD Radeon RAMDisk
4GB Free | 12GB $10 | 24GB $13 | 32GB $15 | 64GB $19
Load, modify and create faster than before with AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk. Enjoy a seamless gaming and Web experience without all the waiting. AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk harnesses the untapped potential of your system’s memory to deliver lightning-fast reading and writing speed and accelerate the loading and processing times of games, Web browsers and software suites.
The free radeon ramdisk download version of RAMDisk will utilize up to 4GB of your computer’s available RAM (up to 6GB if you have AMD Radeon™ memory installed). The more RAM your computer has, the larger the RAMDisk you can create. For users that have more than 8GB of RAM in their computer and would like to utilize that memory for RAMDisk, license keys are available for purchase at various increments — up to 12GB, up to 24GB, up to 32GB and up to 64GB.
4. Gilisoft RAMDisk
USD40
GiliSoft RAMDisk is a high-performance RAM disk application that lets you have a disk on your computer entirely stored in its memory. As the memory is much faster than physical hard disks, reading/writing data on a fast in-memory disk to achieve a higher performance. The virtual disk created by GiliSoft RAMDisk resides in the computer RAM accessible in Windows Explorer and other applications. Like a physical disk, a RAM disk can also be shared so as to be accessed by other computers on a network! You choose its size (depending on the amount of RAM in your system), drive letter, and file system. You can copy, move and delete files on it.
- Delivers Astounding Performance Improvements for Gaming Enthusiasts Using PC/Laptop-Based Games
- Speeds Up your internet Browsing Experience
- Enhances Internet Privacy, Security and Malware Protection
- Optimized Video and Audio Production or Rendering
- Extends the Life and Increases the Performance of your SSD
- Provides Software Developers with Optimized Performance During Compilations, Use of Development Aids Such as MS Visual Studio, and Introduces Database Acceleration into Developed Applications
5. eBoostr
Lite $14 | Desktop $18 | Laptop $22 | Pro $30
eBoostr’s improved buffer technology offers even better performance than before. eBoostr’s intelligent buffer design ensures that only the applications you need are accelerated. As always, you have complete control over your speed gains and can customize and tweak to your hearts content.
6. ImDisk Toolkit
This tool will let you mount image files of hard drive, cd-rom or floppy, and create one or several ramdisks with various parameters. This all-in-one package includes the ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver (2.0.9), the DiscUtils library that extends the number of supported image file formats, and adds several GUIs and features.
7. Ultra RAMDisk
1PC USD30 | 2PC USD50 | 3PC USD70
A lightweight tool that you can use to create a new drive on your hard disc using the RAM memory you have available on your computer. Ultra RAMDisk Lite is an application that can help you eliminate the performance issues that a regular hard drive might have by enabling you to create RAM drives or RAM discs.
- Hybrid-disk (Memory + Swap file)
- SCSI, Direct I/O disk type
- Dynamic memory allocation
- Trim command (Deleted files are to deallocate memory)
- Invisible memory (32-bit 4GB over)
- FAT/FAT32/exFAT/NTFS/NTFS-compression format
- Driver letter, Volume label, Create folder
- Backup and Restore
- Fast startup mode
- Fast data backup
- Maximum 16TB
- Maximum 128 devices
8. Miray RAM Drive
Free | €15-50
Miray RAM Drive provides a classic RAM disk as a virtual drive on Windows. It simulates a real volume that can be used by every application as a super fast additional drive. Miray RAM Drive offers the simple 3 click interface, turning the set-up process into a waltz. Miray RAM Drive Plus allows sizes up to 24 GB (4 GB under 32-bit Windows). It mounts itself automatically after starting Windows.
9. QILING Disk Master Free
Free
The ramdisk feature improves overall system performance and speed. The RAM disk can improve overall system performance. The temporary files frequently accessed by system or other application, and the read and write the RAM memory speeds far greater than the real hard disk, so the RAM disk can improve overall system performance; additional hard disk, and SSD storage medium has its read and write times limit, the RAM disk improve the life of a real hard disk too.
- Save RAM disk data to the file.
- One key to set the temporary directory to the RAM disk.
- When the system starts, the application automatically load the RAM disk.
10. StarWind RAM Disk
Free
StarWind RAM Disk takes a part of the RAM and creates a virtual storage device usable as a disk of tremendous performance. The fact that data is deleted after reboot is not really important in the discussed cases. This approach is very convenient, because any installation has RAM available, thus no additional hardware is purchased. For test and development, troubleshooting process or some niched deployments. StarWind RAM Disk creates a high-performance virtual disk from RAM, offering a near-perfect solution for test and development scenarios, troubleshooting cases or other niched deployments, where size and data volatility don’t really matter.
11. OSFMount
Free
OSFMount also supports the creation of RAM disks, basically a disk mounted into RAM. This generally has a large speed benefit over using a hard disk. As such this is useful with applications requiring high speed disk access, such as database applications, games (such as game cache files) and browsers (cache files). A second benefit is security, as the disk contents are not stored on a physical hard disk (but rather in RAM) and on system shutdown the disk contents are not persistent. At the time of writing, they believe this is the fastest RAM drive software available.
12. ERAM Ram Disk
Free
ERAM v2.24 is an Opensource RAMDisk, ERAM is a handy tool that lets you use RAM as a storage drive on a Windows computer. By having a RAM disk, you can speed up the loading and running of programs that use stored files. It has a size limit of 4 GB that uses page/non-paged/external RAM. You can use it for storing temp files, browser cache, etc. in order to speed up the programs that use those files.
13. SoftPerfect RAM Disk
USD50/licence
[ Not Free Anymore ] SoftPerfect RAM Disk is a free high-performance RAM disk application that lets you have a disk on your computer entirely stored in its memory. As the memory is much faster than physical hard disks, storing temporary data on a fast in-memory disk achieves a higher performance. Whatever your job is, read on to find out what a RAM disk can offer you.
SoftPerfect RAM Disk creates a virtual disk residing in the computer RAM accessible in Windows Explorer and other applications, allowing you to store any temporary information on this disk. Furthermore, Windows can be configured to use the RAM disk for temporary files, so that the system and most applications would use the fast in-memory disk for their temporary data.
As Windows and other third-party applications often create a large number of temporary files for a short time only, using a RAM disk will extend your hard disk’s life by sparing it from excessive reading and writing. Supported platforms – Windows XP through Windows 10, Windows Server 2003 through 2012, 32-bit and 64-bit.
14. SuperSpeed RamDisk
USD80
[ Discontinued ] SuperSpeed Software offers powerful solutions to systems engineers, system administrators and power users whose Microsoft? Windows systems are bottlenecked by disk I/O. Their cache, hybrid cache, and RAM disk products shatter the disk I/O bottleneck, raising performance levels to dramatic new highs. Products include SuperCache, SuperSpeed, RamDisk and RamDisk Plus.
RamDisk Plus adds multiple disk support, system page file support for HDD, and a versatile disk image backup and restore facility. You can manually save the RAM disk’s contents to an image file, or have the contents saved automatically when the computer is shutdown. This feature ensures that service and application data stored on the RAM disk can be preserved between system restarts.
During the subsequent system start-up, the disk’s image is automatically loaded. A “live” RAMdisk image may be backed up even with open handles to the volume. A RAM disk image viewer is included and lets you load image files as read-only devices. RAM disks can be zeroed out upon removal and the disk image file can be preserved upon removal.
The author of this article seems to have overseen the version from “Winramtech” , which is , according my tests , almost the fastest ramdisk of all. On the second place comes the SoftPerfect ramdisk.
with Acronis True Image, each backup causes dynamic size of Primo Ramdisk to increase to full size, giving free memory lack.
Author says his system only used 35% of the 16 GB ram. He is obviously clueless about the huge Windows cache usage in RAM clearly shown.
“By default, Windows caches file data that is read from disks and written to disks. This implies that read operations read file data from an area in system memory known as the system file cache, rather than from the physical disk. Correspondingly, write operations write file data to the system file cache rather than to the disk, and this type of cache is referred to as a write-back cache. Caching is managed per file object.”
source: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/file-caching?redirectedfrom=MSDN
Windows Cache is written on disk, not in RAM. RAMDISK will transfer the cache + other data from disk to RAM. The 35% is correct.
In 2020 nobody needs a RAM disk.. modern OS will do this itsself..
Depending on the OS, is it 32 bit or 64 bit. Letting the operating system cache the file into RAM is more effective however on a 32bit system there is more justification for its use, as the disk cache can’t use more than 2GB of RAM. This is where RAMDisk shows it true performance for 3D Rendering, Games, Large Computing and etc.
Absolutely zero benchmarks. Thanks for turning a potentially amazing article into a simple list. :(
Ram disk are a good to prevent ssd wear down by extensive writes using torrents and download folders, also for applications that writes a lot to the user folder like firefox or chrome. A 1 gb for those apps, and for torrents you can use the rest, specially to download an episode, watch, delete, repeat.
yes, benchmarcks required on this article.
I suggest that you consider adding ERAM to this list. It works on Windows XP/NT/2000/7/10 (32 and 64-bit) and has a maximum limit of 4 GB on Windows 7/10 (until I fix the BSODs caused by using a disk that is larger than that after removing the limit). Its driver and source code can be found by going to https://github.com/Zero3K/ERAM.
The problem with GitHub is not everyone is a tech wizard, the need to compile the software is a big turn off for most. That is the reason why it was not added to the list. The list I compiled is meant for beginners.
You don’t need to compile the software. Binaries are provided in the releases tab, for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Most systems (and those who are looking for RAMdisks) are using 64-bit systems with tons of RAM, so if you’re reading this comment, you might as well check out ERAM and download the 64-bit version from their GitHub.
It would be nice if someone could help me with signing its compiled drivers so I can release a new version that has BSODs fixed, etc.
A comparison chart across these reviewed RAMDISK softwares will be very helpful.
Bonjour,
Je n’ai trouvé sur le site de SOFTPERFECT que la version d’essai d’un mois. Etes vous sur qu’il existe une version gratuite pour un usage personnel?
Cordialement
Did nobody of you never heard of VeloRAM ? -Yes it is a RamDisk Cache for real SSD or HDD based storage volumes. Kind of superfast, please give it a try in your next update to this wonderful page. Thanks.
I have a server that ingests and writes many GB of data per day. This is hard on a data drive. So, instead of writing all this to a physical drive, we write it to a ramdisk. And it doesn’t matter if it goes down…we use the “latest” data of this immense stream, so it would repopulate anyway. I don’t see any downside to using a ramdisk. Super fast, and saves wear and tear on physical drives.
Is RAMDisk faster than SSD?
How does a RAMDisk work?
How do I set up a RAMDisk?
Is it better to have more RAM or storage?
RAM disk is slow now
Softperfect RAMdisk size became limited to 4095 MB after Windows 10 1809 update. This has been fixed in v4.0.8, but not in the freeware 3.4.8 version.
RAMDisk (WinRamTech) is the fasted RAM Disk out there. I have done several tests over the years and WinRamTech RAMDisk consistently takes the top spot in terms of performance.
For those that say you don’t need a RAM Disk with a modern OS, I disagree. The level of control you have with a RAM Disk vs. letting the OS guess what’s best for you is night and day. One of the biggest reasons (IMHO) to use a RAM Disk is to help prevent viruses. Most viruses use temp storage for some part of the attack, so if you point all your temp variables, temporary internet files, etc., to a RAM Disk, every time you boot, all of that is automatically deleted.
Halla – 1) A RAM Disk is much faster than an SSD.
2) RAM Disk software takes a portion of your RAM and presents it as a Drive to the OS, so it looks and acts just like any other hard drive you have in your systems, except way faster.
3) Install RAMDisk (WinRamTech)
4) They are 2 different things. More of both is good! ;-)
WinRamTech RAMDisk is discontinued, no longer being developed, and “when supplies run out”, their web site will be completely shut down. So, that’s out.
If someone want have fast working Programms, he need a RAM-Disk and Sandboxie. You can transfer the Sandboxie Container to the RAM-Disk in the Sandboxie-Settings. Now you must except the files, which should work untouched (bookmarks / history / cookies /settings). Webbrowse becomes very quick. I myself have a slow N3530 Atom-CPU with HDD inside, but it works very very quick.
SuperSpeed LLC is completely gone, so that option is out.
Who uses 32-bit OS anymore today?? It’s all 64-bit by default. I see too much info about benefits of using invisible memory etc while almost nobody has that anymore because of the 64-bit OS. More and more users have 16GB RAM installed with a dedicated graphics card (so no shared memory either), 32GB RAM or more is also becoming more common.
On both old and the newest 2021 systems RAM-disks are far superior in speed then the fastest possible SSD’s. You can read/write old spinning HDD’s all day long without degradation in lifespan and performance. But SSD’s are very prone to wear and tear, specially in writing. Having the Temp-folders on the SSD is not bad, but lifespan degrades quicker.
With the nowadays larger amount of installed RAM it’s easy to use it as a regular drive too besides the Windows Temp-folders. When editing photo, audio and video you’re talking about large amounts of data. When used on a RAM disk it works so much more smoothly. And just save the final results to a HDD or SSD for pemanent storage.
The best possible configuration is put Windows and all programs on your fastest SSD, games on another (fast) SSD if possible, leave personal data on a real solid HDD (never store personal data on the OS drive anyway), and use a RAM Disk for Temp-folders and temporary working space.
OSFMount doesn’t have autostart at startup feature, you should set a command line script or a task in the task scheduler manunally to do it which is very annoying and tricky.
ramdisk is very good to deal with high IO job, such as compacting Outlook pst file
not good on not free and no pagefile now
i am willing to pay US$2x as it help to reduce the ssd loading
Why isn’t a RAM disk created in Video Memory? Today’s video cards have so much 6x memory. I can’t find a reason why nor a program that creates a graphics card memory ram disk.
So Primocache is what I use and purchased, works amazing. Makes your hard drives feel like SSD’s. The more system ram you have the better. What I am looking for is a software similar to PrimoCache that will use system memory to cache hard drive read/writes but that is free. Some of the software here is for RAM Disks (taking memory and creating an E drive that looks like a hard drive, not what I want). Does anyone know of similar software to PrimoCache that is free?
I did recent 2023 test with Ramdisks listed here, whichever were free, and claimed to be “faster than the rest”. My results on AMD 3900x DDR4 3200MHz Windows 10 22H2 are:
– not StarWind, they openly agree
– not OSFMount, middling perf
– Sofperfect RamDisk reigns fastest! (and was for many years!)
but one newcomer beat it.
It was UltraRamDisk Lite.
It got 1400 on 4k 1T reads, while Softperfect got 1000. Just to give you the scale.
Free version is limited to 2GB, which could be enough for you.
Softperfect still has older version available for free, which supports 4GB RAM disk (or slightly less, due to bug). You can find it on MajorGeeks etc.
Imdisk was my go to solution as it is free and supports ISO mounting. Imdisk is the slowest RAMDisk – I tested their latest ImTools package. It is atrociously slow for RAMDisk duties. Avoid it.
UltraRamDisk comes with ISO support too! I need 4 or even 8 GB RAM disk, and the only way to use it with UltraRamDisk is to buy their Pro version for $30.