Using ImDisk Toolkit
ImDisk Toolkit is an application for managing virtual drives. It also includes a utility that allows the creation of RAM drives. Windows 11 Creating a RAM disk with Windows 11 is way faster than with Windows 10, as you get an “installation finished” message as soon as you initiate the ImDisk setup. Windows 10 If you’re on Windows 10 continue with the following steps to finish the RAM disk installation and then restart the system once. Fast Startup speeds up the process of turning on your computer by saving a system state between completely off and hibernation to your hard drive. This happens when the computer writes the contents of your RAM to a stable hard drive. As you may guess, this could mess with your RAM drive’s ability to preserve and track its data. With Fast Startup off, boots may take slightly longer, but it’s doubtful that you’ll notice much. Disabling fast startup will satisfy the warning window, but let’s consider why. This will also allow ImDisk to save your RAM drive’s data to an image file when you shut down your computer. If you don’t, the contents of your RAM drive will be erased completely every time, with no saved image storage. It would also disable the RAM drive’s ability to load the previous content. Basically, the drive would act much more like RAM and much less like a disk. Depending on your use case, that may be disappointing or unusable.
Using Your RAM Drive
You can access and use it just like any normal hard drive. It shows up in Windows File Explorer just like any other drive. However, a RAM drive is exponentially faster than traditional types of storage. And we mean exponentially. You can verify it yourself using Anvil’s Storage Utilities, a raw speed comparison tool. In the following test, my Windows device C drive registered an overall score of 77.63 Mbps with average read and write speeds of 40.44 and 37.20 Mbps respectively. In comparison, the values for ImDisk RAM drive were off the charts with an overall score of 29675.8 Mbps, along with average read and write scores of 21615 and 8080 Mbps respectively. In most cases, it isn’t feasible to buy more RAM simply to have a bigger RAM disk. However, with between 8GB and 32GB of RAM, you can do some useful things. These include:
Video and photo editing: these processes can be resource-intensive, and more traditional means of storage can create a bottleneck slowing them down.Gaming: if you have a lot of RAM, you can run some games from your RAM disk. Imagine how smoothly your games would run if you did this.Statistical modeling: this requires access to data at high speeds. A RAM disk can provide the necessary read/write speeds.
Precautions and Recommendations
You will need to ensure that data stored on your RAM disk is backed up to an image, of course. Luckily, ImDisk pretty much takes care of this. In addition, if you aren’t using a laptop with a strong battery, you should hook up your PC or laptop to a UPS. This way, if there’s a surge or power outage, you’ll be able to shut down your computer safely without losing data. The speed of RAM is undeniable. Another option for taking advantage of this is looking into purchasing a RAM-based solid-state drive. This type of drive uses RAM modules instead of traditional SSD modules. They contain batteries to prevent data loss. However, they are quite expensive, so this is probably only feasible if you absolutely need RAM-level speeds for your work. Image credit: Jéshoots on Pexels RAM drive is also fast because of its unique file characteristics. Unlike an SSD/HDD, it does not use excessive reads and writes from their data bus, and instead, uses a temporary folder to quickly move all the files in or out. It is, therefore, not burdened by several small file units, which leads to faster response time. This gives a RAM drive massive performance gains in terms of throughput values.
