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.
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Entries (RSS)
August 22nd, 2008 16:13
not working with Vista x64 here…
August 20th, 2008 16:35
Hi there again. As posted earlier I have a very good working Vista 64 with 8G of RAM with paging file disabled, Quad Extreme 3Ghz. All of the paging is disabled on all of my disks… My machine keeps running very good. I can multitask between games and reget and music library and pokertracker…. and so on.
Still as pointed out in a lot of articles my system does not get beyond 3G of RAM usage when I check the logs…. So I have like about, more or less, 3G of ram which I would like to assign to a “removable” drive and put readyboost on it…
Problem:
1. I cannot install the ramdrive, it just says failed. I tried with the admin privilige.
2. It seems that the ramdrive cannot be set to act like “removable” media like USB stick.
To speed up my system i’m looking for some High Perf USB memory. Preferably 8G.
August 20th, 2008 06:47
sorry… I am on XP SP3 32bit.
August 20th, 2008 05:47
I just tried to use the program and it gave me a blue screen of death with a ’stop’ error. I selected 256MB and then the computer died. Can anyone help?
thanks.
August 18th, 2008 18:06
Phil,
You may be referring to “executive paging” - you can control whether the kernel mode drivers and code has to be swapped. See here:
Disable paging the executive to improve performance
http://www.metron.co.uk/reference/performance_tips/windows/win_tip23.html
August 18th, 2008 02:25
Putting the swapfile on RAMdrive will probably give a speed improvement, because Windows stupidly swaps parts of the kernel out ALL THE TIME, regardless of how much RAM you have available.
However, as Dan pointed out, it’s better to disable the swap partition. Putting it on the RAMdrive could crash your system if you use up your RAM.
August 18th, 2008 02:14
Warning: I stupidly tried to make a ramdrive of 3G, since I have 6G RAM, forgetting that Windows makes only a max of 3G available to processes.
Instead of giving a warning, it shut the computer off, and it wouldn’t boot again until I said to boot with last usable configuration.
If you haven’t put /3gb in your boot.ini, this would presumably happen if you tried to make a 2G ramdrive.
August 16th, 2008 10:45
[...] Install a Ramdisk Download it here. It’s free and has a gui. Set it to about 192-384mb depending how much you plan to use for [...]
August 13th, 2008 00:00
Yojimbo,
except for the author of the post and a user that says he wants to put the swap in the ramdrive, nobody else recommend it. Putting swap file on ramdrive will be actually counter productive as CPU usage is going to increase. If you have plenty of RAM, rather than put the swap file in a ramdrive better disable virtual memory altogether.
Dan
August 12th, 2008 21:17
I don’t understand???
Many of you are saying that you put your swapfile on ramdisk which is not logical, because when your system eats all the ram then it use swapfile(fake, hard disk memory) and if the swapfile is on ramdisk then … error, error, error …
July 28th, 2008 21:56
UPS,
try running the app ‘as administrator’, otherwise it will keep you prompted for reboot and do nothing.
July 24th, 2008 11:14
Hmm. A small note.
DON’T USE A DISK SIZE OTHER THAN THE ONES IN THE LIST! It’s typeable, but if you enter, say, “1.25G”, it’ll promptly take your whole computer down with a blue screen.
Worse, if you aren’t lucky, your computer won’t even start back up - I’m guessing because those settings were saved and it tries again when you try booting! Ouch. Ouch ouch.
Other than that, well, it works fine - I just wish I could write in my own RAM disk size. It’s happily granular up to the 1G point, but then they start jumping obscenely high like 2G and 4G, etc… and there’s no in between. I needed a 1.25GB disk because 1.0 was too small and I needed the extra 256mb to work in… =(
But thanks for the tool anyway!
July 24th, 2008 09:55
OH MY GOD!
This is the best tool I’ve added to my collection in a long time!
I was Googling for a ram disk, but as noted, all I found was garbage payware RAM disk tools (whatever happened to a RAM disk that came with MS-DOS, Microsoft?). I was about to shell out $8 for a payware RAM disk driver that I couldn’t even tell worked, until I smacked my head straight and googled for “ram disk freeware”!
Now where can I donate those $8? This tool is perfect!
July 24th, 2008 05:49
Oh my god, whatever you use for your translations. Throw it away! The german translation is one of the worst that I’ve ever seen!
July 22nd, 2008 02:18
[...] I am running this from an XP virtual machine with the ram disk that is available for free from here: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/ [...]
July 15th, 2008 04:23
someone asked it before, but did not get an answer i think: is there any way to load the image to the ram disk without using the GUI provided? i would like to write the image at shutdown and load the image (already possible) at startup.
July 12th, 2008 05:10
How can I uninstall it under Vista?
I tried uninstall, it says reboot needed. before reboot rams disk seems deleted but after reboot it is back again.
Any ideas?