The benefits of RAM Disks in terms of its speed advantage are for all to see. The difference is just as stark for write speeds, hovering between 5-6 times for sequential and 3-4 times for random. It about 7-8 times faster in sequential read speeds and almost 20 times faster in random read speeds for small amounts of data. While the M.2 drive is no slouch, the RAM Drive outpaces it by an order of magnitude. As expected, the RAM Disk vs SSD battle turned out to be a wipeout. To measure the difference in the read/write speeds between the RAM drive and the M.2 SSD on my company-issued laptop, I fired up CystalDiskMark 8, the industry-standard free tool to benchmark storage disks. Other forms of storage media, like HDDs and Optical drives, are even slower because of higher access times. SSds, on the other hand, are further limited by the speed of the storage bus, such as SATA or USB. The biggest gain is because of higher maximum throughput, which, in the case of RAM drives, are only limited by the speed of the RAM, the data bus, and the processor. The performance gain is due to multiple factors, including access time, maximum throughput, and type of file system. The read/write speeds of a RAM drive is generally an order of magnitude faster than SSDs – the fastest form of secondary storage available in the market. It is sometimes referred to as a virtual RAM drive or software RAM drive and, is different from a hardware RAM drive that uses RAM chips to create super-fast battery-powered SSDs. Once you mount a RAM Disk, you would be able to use it as a regular secondary storage drive and even install programs on it. There are likely some good uses for RAM disks if you really know what you’re doing.A RAM disk (also called a RAM Drive) is part of a computer’s random access memory that is specifically reserved to be treated as a regular storage drive by the operating system. It’s definitely faster to read and write from RAM rather than to use even a fast SSD. RAM disks aren’t a complete scam like PC cleaning programs and many other “system-optimization” tools are. RELATED: How to Create a RAM Drive in Linux There Must Be Some Uses For a RAM Disk, But… Of course you’ll have to save a new image every time you update the files on the RAM disk. You’ll want to save a copy of the RAM disk so you won’t lose the data if your computer ever goes down. You can then install programs to it or move files to it. Install a program like DataRAM’s RAMDisk Personal - the free version allows you to create RAM disks up to 4 GB in size - and use it to create a new RAM disk. With a RAM disk, you’d have to shut it down manually to free up memory. If you need the memory for something, Windows will instantly discard the cached data. Windows uses unused memory to cache files anyway, and it does it all automatically and in the background. RAM disks also reserve a good chunk of your memory, ensuring you can’t use it for anything else. RELATED: Why It's Good That Your Computer's RAM Is Full Either way, once you load the application, it will stay present in your memory for quick loading later. Once your computer loads an application or other files form its hard drive, it caches them in RAM anyway - so it’s a bit silly to install an application or game in a RAM disk rather than on your hard drive. In other words, you’re simply getting faster program-load times at the expense of longer boot-up times. When you turn on your computer, the RAM disk program would have to read the RAM disk image from your hard drive and load it back into RAM.
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