Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7/8 [VIDEO]


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The performance of a RAM drive is in general orders of magnitude faster than other forms of storage media, such as an SSD, hard drive, tape drive, or optical drive. This performance gain is due to multiple factors, including access time, maximum throughput and type of file system, as well as others.

File access time is greatly reduced since a RAM drive is solid state (no mechanical parts). A physical hard drive or optical media, such as CD-ROM, DVD, and Blu-ray must move a head or optical eye into position and tape drives must wind or rewind to a particular position on the media before reading or writing can occur. RAM drives can access data with only the memory address of a given file, with no movement, alignment or positioning necessary.

A RAM drive (also called a RAM disk) is a block of RAM (primary storage or volatile memory) that a computer's software is treating as if the memory were a disk drive (secondary storage). It is sometimes referred to as a "virtual RAM drive" or "software RAM drive" to distinguish it from a "hardware RAM drive" that uses separate hardware containing RAM, which is an old type of battery backed solid-state drive.

Disadvantages of a RAMDisk

Because the storage is in RAM, it is volatile memory, which means it will be lost in the event of power loss, whether intentional (computer reboot or shutdown) or accidental (power failure or system crash). This is, in general, a weakness (the data must periodically be backed up to a persistent-storage medium to avoid loss), but is sometimes desirable: for example, when working with a decrypted copy of an encrypted file.

Apart from the risk of data loss, the major limitation of RAM drives is their limited capacity, which is constrained by the amount of RAM (in gigabytes) within the machine.

Common RAMDisk usage

A first good usage of a RAMDisk is to redirect TEMP system folder, on Windows, to the new RAMDisk volume (for example R:\); a recommended size for a RAMDisk, for this purpose, is at least 1GB.

To change path of the system folder called TEMP, we have to go on Control Panel >> System:

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

Then we'll to click on (on Windows 7/8/8.1 systems) Advanced system settings and then on Environment variables:

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

After that we'll to change the values for the TEMP and TMP system variables; change those values (not names) with the RAMDisk volume letter (R:\ for example):

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

The change will be immediate.

Many people use RAM disks even to store their Temporary Internet files, since a RAM disk's volatile nature wipes the data when the computer shuts down. (Unless you're automatically saving the disk image, of course.) Some users say that storing files on a RAM disk speeds up browsing, too; moving your caches to RAM keeps needless writes off of your SSDs and HDDs.

Here's a more detailed explanation of how to move the caches of the big three browsers.

Internet Explorer: Microsoft keeps things fairly simple. Go to Tools > Internet Options > General, and then click the Settings button in the Browsing History portion. In the window that pops up, you'll see a Move Folder button in the Temporary Internet Files section. Click it, and then point IE toward a cache folder on your RAM disk.

Firefox: You can't change how Firefox stores its cache without tinkering with the browser's configuration. Type about:config in the address bar, press Enter, and click through the warning. Right-click anywhere on the Preferences list, and then select New String.

Enter browser.cache.disk.parent_directory (note the underscore between "parent" and "directory") as the Preference name, and then list the file path to your RAM disk as the string value. (For example, we could use R:\ as the value.)

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

A Cache folder containing Firefox's temporary files will appear in your RAM disk.

Chrome: Since Chrome won't let you change the location of Temporary Internet files, you'll have to change the way Windows handles the program. It's not as difficult as it sounds.

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Right-click Chrome in the Start menu, and select Properties. In the Target: box, you'll see Chrome's file path, which ends in 'chrome.exe'. Place your cursor at the end of the path, press your keyboard's spacebar once—that's important—and then paste or type the following text:

--user-data-dir="your folder path"

Replace "your folder path" with the path to a cache folder on your RAM disk, but leave the quotation marks intact. Here's an example of how the full Target box should look afterward:

C:\Users\Brad\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --user-data-dir="R:\ChromeCache"

Other Ram Disk freeware programs

There's not only Dataram RAMDisk available as software to create RAM Disks; a lot of other programs can reach the same goal, and these are:

AMD’s Radeon Ramdisk

The free version of AMD’s Radeon Ramdisk lets you create a ramdisk of up to 4 GB. You can choose to assign a drive letter, choose the Disk Label and Save the data on the ramdisk to a local drive.

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

This ramdisk software also allows you to load a previous ramdisk image when you start Radeon RAMDisk. You can choose the location and file name for the image file from the “Load/Save” tab. The image file is where the data will be saved once you choose to close Radeon RAMDisk.

ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver

ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver can create virtual floppy disk, CD/DVD or hard disk using the RAM or using an image file. You can access ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver from the Control Panel or you can use the command line version of the tool too.

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

This RAMdisk software also lets you right-click on any file and use it as a ImDisk Ram disk image. You can save the data on the ramdisk to an image file too. You can also create a disk that acts as a Removable Media or make it a read-only drive.

SoftPerfect RAM Disk

SoftPerfect RAM Disk allows you to create ramdisk of up to 3.5 GB ramdisks on 32-bit systems. However, there is not limit on the ramdisk size you can create on a 64-bit system.

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

This ramdisk software also allows you to set applications that should launch when you start the ramdisk, choose filesystem for the ramdisk, load an image file, export an image file, create a disk as a Removable Media as well.

Modern computers are equipped with at least 1 GB of RAM, and most of the time there is a lot of unused memory that could be used as a high-performance alternative to the slower hard disk storage. This product lets you create any number of virtual RAM disks limited only by the memory available. You can also work with on-disk images and RAM disks associated with an on-disk file, that ensures your data is preserved between sessions.

StarWind RAM Disk

StarWind RAM Disk is another free ramdisk software. To download the free version of this software, the website requires registration. It allows you to create ramdisk with an option to create pre-formatted disk and automatically mount the device so you can use it right away.

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

Creating a Ramdisk for Windows 7

It does not provide much options and has a simple interface that displays the ramdisk’s information. It does not have an option to let you save the data on to an image file however you can always right-click on the created ramdisk drive and choose “Copy” and paste the entire drive to another location.

Conclusion

Ramdisk is a good concept and Ramdisk software let you create Ramdisk on your PC and try it out. Ramdisks can come handy when you want a drive where data can be stored temporarily with faster access time and should perish when you shutdown your computer.

RAMDisk could even used to avoid leaving temporary information availble, potentially sensible, on the system, so RAMDisk are even perfect for security.

Because most of the ramdisk software allows you to save the data on to an image file, you can retrieve the data that existed on your ramdisk. Developers can use a ramdisk to emulate the behavior of an actual hard disk drive, CD/DVD drive or a floppy drive, write to it and make changes without affecting the actual hard disk in any way.

Download

NOTE:: the tools mentioned in this article will be available for download only for registered and logged users. Sorry.

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