Free Ramdisk for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and 2003 Server
Ramdisk or RAM-Disk is a virtual hard drive based on software abstraction that treats a segment of random access memory (RAM) as secondary storage which is similar to hard disks, except with advantage that ramdisk is a lot faster and access time is greatly improved. As there is no mechanical moving parts involved, there won’t be question of wear and tear too. Ramdisk has one obvious downside, that it’s volatile and not solid state. Contents in Ramdisk is stored in computer RAM, which will be lost when the power of computer is switched off.
With these benefits and limit, ramdisk can be used to store frequently accessed yet less important temporary data to speed up the system performance, such as swap space for virtual memory, temporary files used for programs such as Internet Explorer, BT client, P2P eMule, compression utility, translation software and etc, frequently accessed data from a database or used to hold uncompressed programs for short periods. From privacy point of view, Ramdisk is also a working drive for decrypted version of encrypted document, as all trace of the data will be wiped and deleted once power off.
There are plenty of Ramdisk driver and software available, such as RamDisk9xME, RAMDiskXP, RAMDiskSE and RAMDiskVE from Cenatek, RamDisk and RamDisk Plus from SuperSpeed, RAMDisk Enterprise Lite and Full version plus 64 MB limited free RAMDiskbased on Microsoft Ramdisk below from QSoft, and Ramdisk.sys driver for Windows 2000 from Microsoft published under KB257405. However, most of these Ramdisk drivers either is not free, or limit in its functionality especially on the size on RAM-disk. Some not even support Windows Vista.
The following freeware RRamdisk.sys, originally written by Gavotte based on Microsoft’s Ramdisk.sys, and later being added a GUI interface by lyh728 is not only free to use, it also stable, doesn’t have size limitation, supports popular FAT16，FAT32, NTFS filesystems, and supports Windows 2000 operating system and above including Vista.
Download Gavotte Ramdisk with GUI (ramdisk.zip).
Alternative download link.
To use Ramdisk, the most important requirement is that the system has a lot of memory, much a lot than the size of Ramdisk that you intends to create. It works on system with minimum 256 MB RAM, where you’re recommended not to set Ramdisk with size more than 64 MB.
Installation and setup of Ramdisk is pretty simple. Unpack the zip archive to a folder, and run ramdisk.exe. In Windows Vista, you need to right click on it and select “Run as Administrator”, if not you will get a Failed error message. Click on Install Ramdisk to install RRamdisk.sys driver. Answer Yes or Allow if prompted with driver not signed with valid digital signature or can’t verify the publisher of this driver software warning message. Once Ramdisk is installed, all buttons that previously grayed out inactive are now activated.
Now you can set the disk size in Bytes, configure the drive letter for the Ramdisk. You can also specify which media type is the drive – RAM Drive, Fixed Media or Removable Media (for simulating a floppy drive). The default choice, Fixed Media indicates that the Ramdisk is simulating a hard disk drive should work in most case. Click on OK when done with configuration. Note that if you modify the settings of the Ramdisk during the time when system process is accessing the Ramdisk, you will require to reboot the system. Caveat is that, if you put IE Temporary Internet files into the Ramdisk, you will always need to restart computer even though you’re not running IE.
A additional drive, the Ramdisk with default drive letter R: (assuming you’re not changing it) will be created, and immediately accessible for usage.
Other buttons in the Ramdisk GUI are pretty obvious in usage. Use “Remove Ramdisk” to uninstall Ramdisk, or more specifically RRamdisk.sys driver from the system. Save Image… and Load Image… allows users to save or open an image file for the whole contents of Ramdisk, useful if you want to store data in Ramdisk in unaltered state to be open up later.
Ramdisk.exe accepts a image file as its argument so that the image file can be loaded automatically into the Ramdisk from command line. Potential usage include adding of “ramdisk imgfilename” to system boot up script such as autoexec.bat to load the data into memory disk.
There are more customization and other potential usage for Gavotte Ramdisk not included in the GUI. However, you need to manually edit the registry. These additional functions are maintained by addswap.exe and rdutil.exe which explained pretty well by the Readme (included in Page 2). In most case, you won’t need to come to this extent.
Pages: 1 2
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Entries (RSS)
February 27th, 2008 15:34
no
February 27th, 2008 14:47
Sorry, for typing error, it was ‘uninstalled’ in Window safe mode.
February 27th, 2008 14:45
Dear Robert, this program failed to run in my machine running Window Vista Business 32 bit. I attempted a few setting of xxMb to no avail but returned with an error ‘blue screen’ message and rebooted. I have to run in Window safe mood every time to install the program. Any ideas what’s wrong? and how to overcome? Thank you.
February 25th, 2008 06:41
This program fails to install on my XP Pro 64 bits machine. Any ideas why? Thanks guys.B.
February 20th, 2008 03:53
“Ramdisk.exe accepts a image file as its argument so that the image file can be loaded automatically into the Ramdisk from command line. Potential usage include adding of “ramdisk imgfilename” to system boot up script such as autoexec.bat to load the data into memory disk.”
I would love to do this. However, I read the instructions and could not understand them. Can someone please explain the instructions to me in another way. Thanks
January 30th, 2008 16:51
I have 4 gig of Ram on my new XP box. I made a 750 MB Swapfile on my new virtual drive. I opened the entiire MS Office suite and 13 other apps along with 2 major resource hogging games without a hitch. I then rebooted and the drive held it’s formatting. A million thanks!!
January 12th, 2008 16:20
on the other hand i think run as admin would help..
January 7th, 2008 18:05
Hmm..i have problem to remove ramdisk. It would return on next reboot. Any ideas..?
December 12th, 2007 08:24
[...] RAMDisk Guide I found a better, faster, and more compatable RAMdisk here, Free Ramdisk for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and 2003 Server
October 14th, 2007 05:28
Hi mr. Gavotte, I like to compile the driver myself, would that be possible? I use VC Express and have 3790.1830 SDK and tried the Win2000 example from DDK, I asume you used the example to build your version of ramdisk.sys, can you make a little master-class for us to get some insight in the techniques used?
thx for the good work and grtz from Holland
October 9th, 2007 10:10
is there any way to load the image to the ram disk without using the GUI provided?
October 9th, 2007 09:39
okie..thanx a lot robert..appreciate your help
October 3rd, 2007 06:39
First, sorry for the delay. I’ve been out of my home.
Difference is only in bit responsible for media identification.
Some programs “don’t like” virtual disks but they look only at media identifier. If you set the identifier as fixed drive everything become O.K.
Luckily you solved the problem yourself.
Good luck and greetings from Poland
September 25th, 2007 09:23
It worked when I set it as “Fixed Media”. Previously it did not work because I set it as “RAM Drive”. hmmm what is the difference between these two types?
September 25th, 2007 03:21
Run ramdisk.exe.
Set it as “Fixed Media”. What size did you set?
In my case I set 512MB (I have plenty of RAM) and letter “Z”.
Try to run Memtest again with the following configuration:
At the very beginning of the test press C (config box will appear), then 2 then 3 then 3 and again 3. You will force thorough test of all memory.
Run the test for the whole night. In the morning you will have results.
September 24th, 2007 18:20
i already use the memtest.. no errors occured.. hmmm any extra configuration needed after creating the RAM drive? My RAM drive works when it is first created. Once I restarted my pc, windows report that the disk might be corrupted when i tried to aaccess the ram drive
September 24th, 2007 11:37
As the name says
http://www.memtest.org
http://www.memtest86.com
Using Google is recommended behaviour.
September 24th, 2007 10:44
Robert, I did not test the memory with Memtest. what is the purpose of Memtest?
September 23rd, 2007 18:50
[...] an image file into RAM either after starting or on boot up through an autoexec.bat argument. More configuration choices including registry editing are available [...]
September 21st, 2007 14:25
Did you test memory with Memtest?
September 20th, 2007 10:59
Anyone encountered this problem? After creating the RAM disk, I restarted my pc and windows reported that the disk might be corrupted or using a format tat is not compatible with windows. Anyway i am using windows XP.
September 20th, 2007 00:04
It would be nice to see a vista 64-bit version of this.
August 28th, 2007 02:07
Does not work in Vista 64-bit
August 22nd, 2007 07:32
Gavotte! Excellent job!
Your Rramdisk works very fine. It is even suitable to put Windows swapfile on it (what I’ve done).
Thank you.
Robert
June 5th, 2007 23:56
Man, I would really like to thank you for putting Gavotte’s work here. I have been finding a solution like this for the past 5 hours trying out Google-d Win 2K solutions and trial softwares, and most of the time I spent were on Googling and removing them (one almost killed my system). Once again, a big thanks – and I hope you can convey that to Gavotte himself too.