How to convert part of the RAM to a storage disk at a superstitious speed!
Getting a high storage speed is undoubtedly every computer's dream. While people can achieve this by opting to use an SSD instead of an HDD, it is quite expensive. But, if you have such large a large size of the RAM that there is a portion of the total space that is not consumed and remains idle always, you can take advantage of this space and turn it into a storage disk at a superstitious speed, even faster than SSDs.
Yes! You can programmatically use the excess (unused) amount of RAM in your device to create a fast hard drive with a technology called "RAM Disk" so that you can run your favorite programs in the least possible time, improve performance while playing games, and play 4K videos smoothly. If you want to try it, you can create a hard drive from RAM easily and without upgrading any hardware in the device. In this article, we will look at how to do this on Windows 10.
First: What is RAMDisk technology?
It is simply a technology called virtual storage media that is created on the computer and used for a portion of the RAM space to store data of all kinds like regular storage disks. It is worth noting that in the eighties and early nineties there were attempts to create a storage disk by RAM, but they usually failed. But with this technological advancement, it is possible for anyone to get a fast RAM-based hard drive.
But this technology is not as widespread as hard disks whether SSD or HDD due to the high cost of RAM sizes and the constant need for a power source. This leads us to wonder whether this technology can be relied upon to store important data. The answer is "no" since RAM does not permanently retain data - it deletes its contents when the device is turned off or power is lost.
This means that you can't store anything important on your RAM-based hard drive, you'll lose it if the power goes out suddenly unless you don't care about losing these files because you have a backup of them. However, some programs that let you create a storage disk from RAM try to overcome this problem as you will see later.
Second: How to create a hard disk of RAM?
In order to create a hard drive of RAM, first make sure that your computer has enough RAM and that there is actually unused space. Considering that the Windows operating system needs about 2 GB of memory to work properly. And that you have to leave 1 gigabyte of space for installed programs. You will be able to create a 1GB of RAM hard drive, assuming your device has at least 4GB of RAM.
Well, now you need to use a utility to convert part of the RAM to a data storage disk. There are a lot of free and paid options, but we recommend that you adopt ImDisk Toolkit to do the job. It is a free and very simple program that performs many functions other than converting RAM to a hard drive. Once you download the program, install it on your device just like you would any other program. But during the installation process, make sure to include all the components under Components and then press Install until the installation completes successfully.
After installing the program, you will see several icons and files on the desktop, just double-click on the "RamDisk Configuration" file to run the tool responsible for converting RAM to a hard drive. In this window, you don't need to do more than just specify the size you want to convert to a hard disk from RAM, through the "Size" field after selecting GB until the size is specified in gigabytes. We recommend using at least 4GB of storage.
But you can take a better idea of the space to enter by knowing the unused area of RAM. To do this, right-click on the taskbar below and select "Task Manager" from the menu, then press the "More Details" button and go to the Performance tab and then press Memory from the side menu. Now look at the value shown below the "Available" section, as it refers to the available amount of RAM that is not consumed either by Windows or installed programs. You can use this entire space as a hard drive or part of it as you like.
Generally, after entering the required space in the Size field, click the "OK" button at the bottom of the window. This will instantly create a hard drive of RAM, just so fast! You don't need to do anything else.
In some cases, ImDisk may show you a warning message after pressing the OK button that you should disable the "fast startup" feature in Windows to avoid some problems while using the hard drive created from RAM. To do this, press the "Shutdown Settings" button within the warning message to go directly to the Windows Power Control window. From there click on "Change settings that are currently unavailable" and then remove the check ✔ mark () next to the "Turn on fast startup" option below. After that press the "Save Changes" button.
Keep in mind that the "fast startup" feature is one of the most important features of the Windows system to speed up the process of booting into the Windows system after turning on the computer, by saving the system state before stopping it on the primary hard drive. This occurs when the computer stores the contents of the RAM on an SSD or HDD. As you might expect, this may tamper with the RAM-based hard drive's ability to retain stored data.
With this feature turned off, the device may take a little longer to boot. But on the other hand, it will allow ImDisk to save a copy of the data stored on the RAM disk when the computer is turned off and then restore it again when it restarts. Thus, if you do not turn off the feature, the contents of the disk will be completely erased each time you shut down the computer as a backup copy of the data will not be stored.
Read also: 6 Different Ways to Run Task Manager in Windows 10
In any case, after selecting the disk size within ImDisk and pressing the OK button, you will see the new hard drive next to the basic hard drive partitions on File Explorer as shown in the image above. This disk is marked "RamDisk", and you can use and store data on it like any other storage disk. The only exception is the superstitious speed that you will notice while running programs and transferring data.
We have already tried this technology on our devices and the speed difference has been significantly evident. When we ran a speed test with CrystalDiskMark between an SSD and a fragmented RAM, the result was decisive for the latter. As can be seen in the picture, an SSD NVMe hard drive offers a read speed of up to 2595 MB/s, while the RAM provides a read speed of more than 5000 MB and the DDR4 RAM used is 2133 MHz.
So, the difference is obvious and there is still no storage disk that can reach this speed. You can take advantage of this by installing programs and games on this disc to play faster than usual or storing large files such as HD videos for uninterrupted viewing. The technique is worth trying anyway.