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Optimise your OS with the AMD Radeon RAMDisk application

by Alistair Lowe on 11 October 2012, 12:15

Tags: AMD (NYSE:AMD)

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qabnm5

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When we think of RAMDisks, the first thing that comes to mind is that if the power is cut, data is lost and so we tend to steer clear of anything that attempts to place our precious files into volatile memory.

AMD believes, however, that RAMDisks are more relevant now than ever and that they have the potential to seriously enhance our PC experience. As such, AMD has teamed-up with specialist firm, Dataram, to launch the AMD Radeon RAMDisk and RAMDisk Xtreme software suites.

The former will allow users to automatically create disks of up to 4GB in RAM for free, whilst the latter, which can be had for ~$20, will allow users to automatically create virtual storage of up to 64GB. It's perhaps worth noting that owners of Radeon-branded memory, which the company launched earlier this year, will be able to squeeze 6GB out of the free edition.

Advantages over a standard spinning disk are clear:

  • Gaming up to 1,700 per cent faster
  • Significantly faster general performance - read performance up to 25.6GB/s with DDR3-1600 RAM
With SSDs all-the-rage right now, the extra speed offered by RAMDisks may seem unnecessary, however, there are very real advantages to adopting a RAMDisk:
  • Keep temporary files and saves off the SSD - extending drive life
  • SSDs can dump data into RAM at incredible speeds, reducing the time it takes to prepare a RAMDisk after boot
For those who wish to give AMD's Radeon RAMDisk a try, you can head over to the following link and, please, let us hear about your experiences: www.radeonramdisk.com.

An example of a RAMDisk implementation



HEXUS Forums :: 27 Comments

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Kudos to AMD for bringing this to masses. I will definitely give this one a try. Have SSD as primary but work a lot with Adobe Premiere Pro and have 16GB of RAM. Surely I could “lend” 4GB for some caching.
Likewise extremely interested. Most games don't seem to touch 16 Gb of RAM, so if this works, it'd be a free boost (how noticeable in real world terms rather than metrics I have no idea but I'd love to find out).
Hmm, can't spare a single GB atm, but would be pretty awesome for caching.
if anyone wants to play about with RAM disks, I highly recommend the FREE imDisk utility: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/

It lets you mount RAMDISKs in a variety of fashions and even works as a basic image file mounter (for .isos and such). considering it's free, it works surprisingly well.
Last time I used ramdisks was when I had an Amiga 1200. Used to load disk 2 of most games to ram disk seeing as it had 2 meg ram and games only needed 1 :)

I need more RAM to make this worthwhile for games.