In general, there are three different types of memories used on any computer. One is the non-volatile storage memory for saving your files such as hard disk drives, solid state drives, pen-drives, external USB drives, SD cards and more. The second slightly faster memory is RAM which is installed on the RAM. Third and the fastest of them all is the CPU cache which is built inside the processor chip. The reason why these many different types of memories are used is so that data can be read or written from hard drive (slow), kept in RAM ( faster) and processed in the CPU (fastest).
CPU cache is not very large in size but these days we have huge RAM capacities. Computers with 16 GB of RAM have become very common. We can use this extra RAM to create really fast but volatile RAM drives using freeware ImDisk on Windows. The advantage of RAM drives is that they give you super fast read/write speeds. Here is how:
- Download and install ImDisk from https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/. During the installation do not forget to choose RamDisk Configuration Tool.
- After it has been installed, double-click on RamDisk Configuration Tool shortcut from the desktop. If you cannot find it on the desktop, it can be searched from the Start Menu or from C:\Program Files\ImDisk.
- In the RamDisk Configuration Tool, you can choose the size of the RAM drive. The size should not be very large or it can make your PC unstable. As a rule keep the size to less than 1/3 of the total RAM capacity. We can choose a drive letter to be assigned to the RAM drive and format it with NTFS or FAT32. We can also choose a disk image that should be loaded into this RAM drive. After this clicking on the OK button will create that RAM drive on your Windows PC.
The created RAM drive loses its contents as soon as you shutdown or restart your PC. ImDisk allows you to save the contents to a local folder if needed. It also gives an option to automatically re-create this RAM drive all over again at the Windows startup.