With the arrival of solid-state drives and RAID configurations, it's possible to achieve transfer speeds that obliterate traditional hard drives, but there's an even faster option. Of course, we're talking about the RAM disk or RAMDisk, which takes a portion of the available system memory to create a virtual disk. Access and transfer speeds on a RAMDisk are practically unbeatable, and if you want to know how to make one, here's what you need.
Modern systems come with an impressive amount of RAM, and although few applications can use it all (some games already demand at least 8 GB), we all know well that you can never have too much memory. If we combine a good amount of RAM with the virtues of solid-state drives, the computer's performance will reach a level far above average. However, having a lot of memory in the system opens another possibility: the RAM disk, or simply RAMDisk. With the help of an external application, the system dedicates a percentage of RAM to create a unit that behaves like any hard drive.
Apps to Create a RAMDisk
One of those applications is ImDisk, which is divided into two parts: the virtual disk driver, which offers a Spartan but powerful interface for creating the RAMDisk, and the ImDisk Toolkit, a parallel development with much friendlier options for the novice user. The process is reduced to specifying the amount of RAM to be allocated and the letter for the new drive. Once we confirm the creation, Windows will likely ask to format the drive, which we should do immediately. Once that's done, the sky is the limit.
You can install whole programs on the RAMDisk if you wish, but remember that it is volatile storage, meaning that its contents will be lost when you shut down the computer. Both variants of ImDisk offer the ability to create images of the drives and save them to a traditional disk to restore later.
Another advantage to consider is that ImDisk is an open source development and imposes no limits of any kind, with the only exception being available RAM, of course. I've noticed that many users use RAM disks as the destination for their browsers' temporary files, or for much heavier and more demanding tools like Photoshop.
The only risk of a RAMDisk is the one we mentioned above: a sudden power outage will cause the total loss of information on the drive. But despite that, I think it's worth experimenting. The performance gains are too great not to try.
