top of page
enrabcicabbbe

Windows RAMDisk: The Ultimate Guide to Boosting Your PC Performance



Can use Physical Address Extension to create a virtual disk in memory normally inaccessible to 32-bit versions of Microsoft Windows (both memory above the 4 GB point, and memory in the PCI hole).[14] There is also an open source plugin that replaces the RAM drive on Bart's PE Builder with one based on Gavotte's rramdisk.sys.[15]




windows RAMDisk




Romex Software Providing a fancy interface which is working with all windows environments from (XP to windows 10) and all windows servers editions from (2003 to 2019 currently) supports up to 128 Disks up to 32GB for Pro Version and 1TB for Ultimate and Server editions, supports to use invisible Memory in 32bit versions of windows, with saving at shut down or hibernate, Paid and trial versions available [18]


Ramdiskadm is a utility found in the Solaris (operating system) to dynamically add and destroy ramdisk volumes of any user defined sizes. An example of how to use ramdiskadm to add a new RAM disk in a Solaris environment is as follows:


All created RAM disks can be accessed from the /dev/ramdisk directory path and treated like any other block device; that is, accessed like a physical block device, labeled with a file system and mounted, to even used in a ZFS pool.[27]


This software is for personal use only. If you would like to use this software for business/commercial use (or any purpose other than personal use), a commercial license fee and appropriate commercial license is required. The registration and payment of the commercial license fee is supported and made available through our website at -and-services/software/ramdisk by selecting the option for "Commercial Licenses" or by emailing ramdisksales@dataram.com.


Is it possible to put the entire operating system on a ram disk? If I have 16 GB of RAM and it is an Intel Xeon. I don't have an SSD and my hard drive is killing my boot time. So can I just allocate some of my ram to work as if it were an SSD and install windows and vital software on it, to gain super fast speed. Or is it more trouble then its worth and would be better off just buying an SSD?


I don't have an SSD and my hard drive is killing my boot time. So can I just allocate some of my ram to work as if it were an SSD and install windows and vital software on it, to gain super fast speed.


The big problem here is that ramdisks are volatile. So even if you can get windows to run from a ramdrive and even if you have enough memory to run something that's not a crazy stripped down install, every time you do a cold boot you would have to re-copy stuff from your hard drive to the ram drive. If your goal is to reduce boot times that renders ramdrives fairly pointless.


You can use grub to create a ramdisk then load a vhd image into it and boot it.Then you can save the image to disk before shutdown saving your work. It does indeed work with windows 10 and does have a point over sshd because it reduces the write cycles to the drive, and ram is much faster than sshd. Minimum size you can make windows 10 up and running is 3.9 g stripping everything out you do not need.


Consider the following scenario. You have a Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Service Pack 1 (SP1) site server that has the Pre-Boot Execution Environment (PXE) service point role. However, you cannot customize the ramdisk TFTP block size as expected. Specifically, the boot image downloading process fails with a time-out error because the block size is too large.


ramdisk.sys is a driver that you can get from Microsoft as a driver demo but it apparently isn't guaranteed to work on Windows 7, so good luck with that. You can find other ramdisk implementations, but then you have to install them which means modifying your drive (ie, Step 1: install a sketchy driver).


So this begs the question of what you're trying to do, really. If your goal is to create a sandbox for some executables so that they can't write to the local drive(s), this doesn't sound like the right approach. If the goal is to make a small suite of executables readily available so they run quickly, again, this doesn't seem like the right approach - Windows caches executables ANYWAY, so they second launch is faster. If the goal is to make a small, easy to clean up area for executables to run in, the windows temp directory is supposed to be the place for that. If you're trying to make a system like norton utilities or ghost that give unfettered access to the hard drive without leaving a trace, I question whether or not .NET is the right way to go for that since .NET is going to be hitting your HD hard and heavy anyway. If your goal is to create a virus or a trojan horse that hides its payload in a ram drive, I question your motives.


Another option instead of a ramdisk is Dokan, which is a user-mode file system driver. Making an in-memory drive from that is straight forward - I did a quick .NET app that made TWAIN scanners appear as drives as a demo, but I found that dokan, at the time I was using it, made my machine fragile: any misstep while I was working with it meant a trip to reboot land. And again, it requires the installation of a driver. Hopefully this has gotten better.


I was using Gavotte's edition of the Windows RAMDisk driver for a while in my windows XP installation for a while already and my results were so far really good. Using the RAMDisk driver I was able to use my full 4GB RAM in my Windows 32 Bit environment.


2) If i had up another 4GB of RAM to a total of 8GB to my computer, how could i use 4.5 GB as RAMdisk ? I saw RAMDISK is using fat 32 so one large volume would not work as swap file could not be larger than 2GB. Should i use multiple smaller ramdisks ? Is that possible ?


Long story short - I had pagefile on the ramdisk and everything worked quite fine until Flash started crashing and then I started to find that running a file compare resulted in different results each time. And OCCTPT reported CPU error.


It may be too early to say if this problem was incompatibility with use of pagefile on the ramdisk, the fact I had changed in recently to auto-resizing (it seems the problems started around that time) or what.


Either way. The fact that the file compares gave different results randomly suggests that file corruption was also possible during copying. Now it may be all related to the auto-resizing pagefile but personally I'd rather have a ramdisk that I can be sure of that it is not overlapping GPU memory and that pagefile is fully supported on the ramdisk. I have no use for 32bit that can't have pagefile on the ramdisk reliably so I am going back to 64 bit (64 bit support on debuggers is improving slowly so my 32 bit needs are reducing).


I'll add a note here that I was not using the hack to make 32bit support 8+GB because I don't want to use anything that could possibly interfere with windows update patching, and modifying the OS files has potential to do so. Now if you do all your browsing in a VM or another machine and are able to run the modified OS with all networking disabled, which should be doable (you should be able to pass eg. USB WLAN stick to WM without enabling networking on the host), or use a hypervisor solution, then by all means hack your OS. Otherwise doing a permanent mod to kernel is something I personally would not do unless you have systems in place to alert when that kernel file is patched by MS and can verify that it's actually patched (for security exploits) even though you are using your hacked file.


I have a 4GB system on D2700 nettop, win 7 home basic sp1 32bit, Maxtor 160GB 3,5'' hard disk and the system obviously leave me only 2,99GB memory. Enabling PAE and Gavotte the system works, or better starts. But with strange results. I created a ramdisk of 768MB, as selected in menu of gavotte (I have 1GB unused), but it creates a ram disk (label: RAMDISK-PAE) of 4GB (checked on disk properties).


At the beginning, the used ram is 700MB and the total physical memory is 3060MB. I started to copy files, the system gave me a not enough space errror after I effectively copied about 4GB of files. In the meantime and also at the end of copy the memory usage of system was always 700MB on 3060MB. So, what the hell is happening?Some other info: I Installed floatled, an utility who shows which partition is reading/writing, and seems that files was really read on a disk and write on ramdisk.From ramdisk I can cancel files but not some directories (!): I always checked if read only flag was enableb, but disabling it some directories was canceled, others not.


still in a 32bits.... pfff ! Me too i'm on 32bits, no problemo man ! If programs need more ram, they used the pagefile.sys on ramdisk !!! Total speed and perfect working applications on a stable system. Hapiness !


an enlightening article. here is an application elsewhere, a challenging one, if you can resolve. i used to run mcafee 5.400 under dos command, booting with cd (minipe xp). it had been fun.eversince newly released mobos must comply to vista-standard, microsoft has been poisoning the usage of wxp_sp3 with its updated service pack 3. first with its UAA Bus Driver for HD Audio (error 0xE000027)). then with its ridiculuous BCD (Boot Configuration Data) and then pushing the mobo producers not to embed IDE controller (a disk read occurred. press ctrl+alt+del to restart). intel motherboards are the worst one. they can not beat the AMD in 64-bit technology.most intel mobos love to fail to provide the system to access the high memory area. crash, blue screen, reboot. some of the worst are G41 and G31 chipsets. enough for the beetching.my problem is that windows nowadays love to limit the system to access the 'wasted, unused RAM', by replying "Program too big to fit in memory".back in the early 1990s, whenever computers were provided without harddisk, I used to create a RAM disk to reserve the life of the 1.44 MB and/or 1.2 MB disk drive. i copied the WordStar (ws7) and/or 123 programs to the RAM disk. although the RAM was 4 MB, the computer worked much faster than to access the diskette. it was like a lightening speed, back that days.jens, and anybody, can you help me out with this thing?thank you anyway. nice work. 2ff7e9595c


1 view0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Комментарии


bottom of page