What is RAM Disk? How does it work?

What is RAM Disk?

RAM Disk is a kind of software abstraction of the drive. Tell your computer to treat a few sticks of RAM like a hard drive. By reusing RAM you get a huge speed boost but it's not without its drawbacks.

RAM Disk eliminates a defining feature of a drive, which is permanent data storage. As volatile memory, RAM will be erased every time power is lost, but in return it is fast and flexible. By comparison, hard drives and even the best SSDs are slower, but they can store large amounts of data at low cost without needing a power source.

After all, if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we make a hard drive out of RAM?

The sharp decrease in RAM prices also contributes to the increase in the number of RAM Disks. While we're seeing prices go up again (especially with newer DDR5 memory), incorporating a blazing-fast 64GB disk is still within the 'affordable' range. However, the best gaming RAM is still extremely expensive compared to SSDs or HDDs.

How does RAM Disk compare to other drives?

While typical HDDs clock around 120 MB/s, modern PCIe 5.0 or Gen5 SSDs easily surpass 10,000 MB/s in sequential read/write speeds. But even these speeds are worse than RAM Disk DDR4, averaging about 30,000MB/s. A DDR5 RAM Disk even exceeds that.

Because RAM Disks can only store data when they have power, any data you want to keep needs to be stored somewhere else. This means that RAM Disks need to load data at startup, copying information from the primary storage medium, such as SSD or HDD. If you've ever copied gigabytes of information, you probably know that it takes time.

That's why using RAM Disk as a regular storage drive is so cumbersome. The time you save during processing will be reduced by the time it takes to load data into RAM. That leads to high startup costs, but that investment is recouped at breakneck speed.

Should I use RAM Disk?

Bottom line: RAM Disk is an ineffective way to get access to faster-than-SSD storage on your device. It doesn't make sense financially or even functionally.

But there are some use cases where the utility of RAM Disk cannot be denied. For example, if you have more than enough RAM to spare, such as on a 32GB or 64GB RAM system, you can use part of it as a separate RAM drive to run certain applications, like Adobe Premiere Pro, will benefit from lightning-fast speeds. You can even try running heavy games on RAM Disk to see if the improved load times are worth it.

But to decide whether to use RAM Disk or not, you need to consider its pros and cons.

Advantage

1. Significantly faster than high-end NVMe SSDs
2. It doesn't cost anything if you have plenty of RAM available on your device
3. Ideal for use as temporary storage for productivity workloads
4. Can speed up loading time in games
5. Can speed up web browsing if used to store browser cache

Defect

1. It's a lot more expensive than high-end SSDs of the same capacity
2. It is volatile memory and cannot retain any data after a power cycle
3. Risk of reducing available memory for common tasks on your PC

RAM Disks are faster than anything else, but their applications are extremely specific. They are not really hard drives or SSDs in the traditional sense. Rather, they are extremely fast temporary storage media that can be treated like a hard drive by your operating system. While RAM Disks aren't too useful for regular consumers, enthusiasts can see a big boost by setting up and creating RAM Disks in Windows.