We all know what a RAM disk is – it is a virtual disk made using some portion of the RAM memory. The benefits of such a RAM disk are usually the very fast access speed and disposable nature of the contents. Now Dataram and AMD have taken the concept a step a little further and created a software called AMD Radeon RAMDisk. This software can create a RAM disk for your use, save the contents automatically to a file on your local disk (it could be HDD or SSD) upon Windows shutdown and load them back again when you boot into Windows.
The overall effect of the AMD Radeon RAMDisk is that you will have a real fast disk on your PC that has access speeds of many hundreds times that of an SSD. If you are wondering why should you bother with this RAM disk at all then here is a list of benefits you might get from it:
- Load PC games on the RAM disk to improve their performance
- Load productivity suites (like graphics editors) on the RAM disk to launch them in seconds
- Reduce the video rendering time by storing them on the RAM disk
- Compress larger ZIP files faster through RAM disk
- Reduce web page loading time by storing web cache of browser on the RAM disk
- Increase SSD life by storing most used files on the RAM disk
Free version of the AMD Radeon RAMDisk software can be configured to create a RAM disk of up to 4 GB in storage size. And of course, your Windows PC must have RAM in the order of 8 GB or even more than that for it to work. The paid versions of the software can create RAM disks of up to 64 GB and for them your system should have RAM larger than the RAM disk capacity that you wish to create.
In the settings section of the AMD Radeon RAMDisk software, you can change the storage capacity of the RAM disk, change the drive letter assigned to it and change the volume label for it. After this you have to click on the Start RAMDisk button to start the RAM disk service. Clicking on the Stop RAMDisk button will stop this service and destroy all the contents of the RAM disk unless they were saved to the storage file first.
Conclusion: If you have a PC with RAM in the orders of 8GB and above, then you can benefit from the AMD Radeon RAMDisk and get yourself a real superfast RAM disk for your Windows PC.
You can download AMD Radeon RAMDisk from http://www.radeonramdisk.com/.
imdisk does all of this already for free.