# ImDisk -- open source RAM drive with no size limitations



## Blameless

I've searched high and low for freeware or open source RAM drive programs, but in general all the free one were either very incomplete and required heavy manual editing/compiling of files, extensive use of the command line, or had arbitrary limits on drive size that made them useless.

I was willing to pay for a full featured program, but many of these had arbitrary OS restrictions, and since I'm using server OS, I would have had to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get something like SuperSpeed's RamDisk 11. I was about to purchase Dataram's RAMDisk (and it does have compelling features for the price), when I stumbled upon *ImDisk* (http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk).

ImDisk is a virtual disk driver with the ability to create and copy images to system memory. It has a signed 64-bit driver and no practical limit on disk size. It's easy to install (a bit harder to remove) and extremely lightweight.

I've been using ImDisk and a variety of images I've created to really put to use the 24GiB of RAM I've got in my primary system. I have images for my games, which all but eliminates streaming pauses and significantly reduces load times. I run my smaller virtual machines from RAM disk images, making response virtually instantaneous. Basically, anything that is disk limited that I can fit into about 20-22GiB I can vastly speed up by dumping into a RAM drive.

Disks can be created and mounted on the fly, and formated as you would any other disk. You can back them up to image files and mount them later, with their contents intact.

The biggest downside is that you have to do everything manually. The program is not hard to use, but it's not automated in any way. Still, for the price of zero, I'm pretty damn impressed.

This is the interface:









And here is a bench of the disk I put Crysis on:









As you can see it's more than an order of magnitude faster than good SSD; access times are also in the nanoseconds.


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## jellis142

With the price of RAM, I don't think it's crazy to max it out anymore, especially with those results.


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## Angmaar

It's good to see that someone finally made a free ramdisk program. I'll use this next time I need a ramdisk.


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## kremtok

Looks very promising. How long does it take to mount / unmount an image from your hard disk? We can't play Crysis all the time, and it looks like this can't be used to install a primary OS, so I'd imagine you spend a bit of time swapping virtual disks.


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## Blameless

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kremtok;14496586*
> Looks very promising. How long does it take to mount / unmount an image from your hard disk? We can't play Crysis all the time, and it looks like this can't be used to install a primary OS, so I'd imagine you spend a bit of time swapping virtual disks.


Depends on the speed of the disk you are copying the image to/from. It's pretty much a straight function of your drive's sequential read/write speed.

At 250MiB/s either of my RAID 0 arrays can load a 12GiB image in under a minute, and most games in under 30 seconds.

I usually make my images as small as practical, have multiple ones mounted, and swap them as little as possible.


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## Kramy

Hmmm... +60 seconds to load Crysis - and a fairly manual procedure. Handy if you have specific things that need to be _fast_, though.

Downloaded/archived, for when I get more memory.









Have you looked into FancyCache? It's in beta right now. It's a block level cache, so repeat reads and writes get cached to RAM. Try it out and run some benchmarks. I don't have enough RAM to give it a fair shake, but with a 16GB cache I'm sure it'd be awesome.









http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/help.html


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## Blameless

Yeah, ImDisk is pretty basic. Still, I'm getting quite a bit of use out of it.

FancyCache looks superficially similar to what Windows already does by, but I see there are extensive customization options. It might be worth a look, but I would prefer a free/open program.


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## Kramy

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless;14501868*
> *FancyCache looks superficially similar to what Windows already does* by, but I see there are extensive customization options. It might be worth a look, but I would prefer a free/open program.


Not even close.

It's a block level cache, rather than file caching... they each have their own merits, and they can work side by side if your usage requires it.

Without FancyCache unzipping Sun Javadocs takes about 40 seconds. With it, it takes ~4 seconds. Even an SSD can't touch that. Writes are suddenly the speed of RAM. I can pause/save huge VMs in seconds flat, then it slowly drains to drive/array in the background.


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## Blameless

Very interesting.

What's CPU utilization like, especially during large writes? How is disk I/O managed as things are moved to the drives? Any slowdowns?

I've noticed that Window's cache (or maybe Intel's write back cache is responsible) will let me save or write large files much faster than my drives are actually capable of, but that there is a noticeable slow down until things are actually finished writing to the disk.


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## Kramy

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless;14507752*
> What's CPU utilization like, especially during large writes?


Couldn't say. With 3000MB/sec write speeds, I can't tell you what's good or bad.







It seems to nearly max out one core when benching in CrystalDiskMark.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless;14507752*
> How is disk I/O managed as things are moved to the drives? Any slowdowns?


Depends. You can tweak it to have whatever behaviour you want. On one drive I use a short but large write buffer for FRAPS recording. It lets me grab close to a minute of footage at 2048x1152 on a lowly WD Green, but it tries to dump it to disk as fast as possible.









On my OS drive I use "write averaging", which apparently leaves gaps between writes for reads to take place. It continually adapts based on the average access time. Even when huge copies are taking place, my web browser and stuff remain fairly responsive.
Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless;14507752*
> I've noticed that Window's cache (or maybe Intel's write back cache is responsible) will let me save or write large files much faster than my drives are actually capable of, but that there is a noticeable slow down until things are actually finished writing to the disk.


Definitely write-back cache.

This does the same thing. After unzipping Sun Javadocs in 4 seconds rather than 40 seconds, the drive is slow for a good 15-20 seconds afterwards. (presumably it's writing tons of small files to the drive)

For some tasks the difference is enormous.


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## Shadow11377

I'm using the Superspeed RAMDisk program, and it's pretty good.

I've got one stick of PNY Optima 1333MHz Ram in my system temporarily and I'm getting the speeds below. I wonder what this would be like if I had a Dual Channel kit..








Doing these tests uses 20-30% of my 2600K At 4.0GHz.

Damn I forgot to add the picture... one sec.

I wish there were 8GB RAM Modules out, my motherboard supports 32GB but I was only able to find 4x4 kits at a decent price. That'll limit me to a 10GB RAMDisk when I get Windows 7 which is just enough to load some PC Games on, nothing like World of Warcraft though.


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## Blameless

Pretty impressive speeds.

Not sure how much of that is due to Super Speed's driver and how much is a result of Sandy Bridges memory controller.

There are 8GiB unbuffered DIMMs available, but they are quite expensive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211564


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## Snakecharmed

Here's a benchmark comparison of different software from a couple of years ago.

http://www.raymond.cc/blog/archives/2009/12/08/12-ram-disk-software-benchmarked-for-fastest-read-and-write-speed/

I'm using the latest Dataram RAMDisk at the moment, but I may switch to ImDisk because of its 4K performance.










Looking at the following thread with the screenshots of other people's benchmarks, it looks like the latest version of ImDisk is by far the fastest with 4K reads and writes.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?267096-RAMdisk-scores


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## Quantum Reality

Looks pretty slick! I'm a sig this.


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## Blameless

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Snakecharmed;14601417*
> Looking at the following thread with the screenshots of other people's benchmarks, it looks like the latest version of ImDisk is by far the fastest with 4K reads and writes.
> 
> http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?267096-RAMdisk-scores


Yeah, I've noticed this with my own scores.

Even my first gen i5 in my laptop gives 4k scores similar to much faster systems with different programs.

Still need more information on the test setups; I don't see many people stating file system or cluster size.

I normally use exFAT with a 32k cluster size on my RAM disks. NTFS has too much overhead, while FAT32 is limiting to 4GiB file size.


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## Shadow11377

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless;14599100*
> Pretty impressive speeds.
> 
> Not sure how much of that is due to Super Speed's driver and how much is a result of Sandy Bridges memory controller.
> 
> There are 8GiB unbuffered DIMMs available, but they are quite expensive.
> 
> http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211564


I looked forever for something like that. Those ADATA modules seem to pop in and out of the search results by the hour, so I figured they may have been mislabeled or something. If I had the cash, I'd so purchase two sets of those.
Imagine this setup?
4GB for OS / Programs
28GB RAMDisk - Load Games or whatever directly onto it and never see another long loading screen!


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## Snakecharmed

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Blameless;14604024*
> Yeah, I've noticed this with my own scores.
> 
> Even my first gen i5 in my laptop gives 4k scores similar to much faster systems with different programs.
> 
> Still need more information on the test setups; I don't see many people stating file system or cluster size.
> 
> I normally use exFAT with a 32k cluster size on my RAM disks. NTFS has too much overhead, while FAT32 is limiting to 4GiB file size.


Dataram RAMDisk (at least the free version) only supports FAT16 and FAT32. I assume that my cluster size is the 4KB default for a 4GB FAT32 volume.


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## Kramy

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Shadow11377;14606682*
> I looked forever for something like that. Those ADATA modules seem to pop in and out of the search results by the hour, so I figured they may have been mislabeled or something. If I had the cash, I'd so purchase two sets of those.
> Imagine this setup?
> 4GB for OS / Programs
> 28GB RAMDisk - Load Games or whatever directly onto it and never see another long loading screen!


If you're going to spend $800 on RAM and use it as storage, just spend $800 on an SSD and get about 240-360GB of 1GB/sec goodness.

There's practically no difference between a super fast SSD or RAM when it comes to most game loadtimes. Your CPU still has to decompress textures/models/etc. With a 800MB/sec+ storage medium, your CPU is going to be the bottleneck in loading. (well, until next decade







- these things change every few generations when there's a technological leap)


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## Shadow11377

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Kramy;14612609*
> If you're going to spend $800 on RAM and use it as storage, just spend $800 on an SSD and get about 240-360GB of 1GB/sec goodness.
> 
> There's practically no difference between a super fast SSD or RAM when it comes to most game loadtimes. Your CPU still has to decompress textures/models/etc. With a 800MB/sec+ storage medium, your CPU is going to be the bottleneck in loading. (well, until next decade
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> - these things change every few generations when there's a technological leap)


Perhaps, but the reason I want a RAMDisk to run games off of is that it is Optional. One short load (HDD-RAMDisk) then the HDD Bottleneck while gaming is gone until I wipe it or reboot. When I'm done I can disable the RAMDisk and reap the benefits of 32GB RAM for everything else.

Also, I've got a _lifetime_ warranty on my RAM so if they ever go bad I can get it replaced for the shipping cost. I've not seen an SSD with that offer yet!

I've got no intentions of purchasing the RAM for $800, instead I'll pick some up when it becomes more reasonably priced.


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## corhen

very entertaining program.. makes me wish i had 30Gb of ram, not 8










gonna load a game on it tomorrow, and play around


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## Starbomba

Subbed. Definitely interested on running this for some games, especially since almost nothing i have gets even near to 4 GB RAM in usage (except BOINCing NFS WU's, 4 of those buggers can swallow up to 5-6 GB RAM, main reason i got 8 GB, as with 40 chrome tabs + 4 NFS tasks + 2 PrimeGrid tasks i nearly max out my RAM)

EDIT: Installed it and tried it out. I gotta say WOW, if this is what an SSD feels, i do not know how i've lived without one. Too bad the game i wanted to run the most like this won't fit my RAM (SC2 takes 8 GB installed), but for the rest, it's definitely a change over traditional HDD's. And gotta love the almost-zero load times


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## Mr.Eiht

Happy NEW YEAR lads!
Problem solved, found a nice guide here:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=356046
Now I created a persistent disk with the stuff I need.


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## Blameless

Thanks for the guide. I have to admit I never really put much thought into auto allocating the disk on windows startup, probably because I restart my systems far less often than I swap images.


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## Starbomba

Intersting guide. Might look at it for my sig rig, though i do swap images a lot more as well (would do well for small stuff though).


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## Obfuscator

Thanks to Quantum Reality's signature, I found this thread. I am interested in a good RAM disk program. Does anyone happen to know if there is any spyware or malware associated with this program?


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## Sean Webster

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Obfuscator*
> 
> Thanks to Quantum Reality's signature, I found this thread. I am interested in a good RAM disk program. Does anyone happen to know if there is any spyware or malware associated with this program?


None lol, I use it all the time.


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## Obfuscator

Thanks for your feedback Sean.


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## ForestPeterson

This thread has discussed the gaming application - does it benefit CAD applications. The AutoCAD Civil 3D hangs on orbit initiation, as best I understand, the software uses the file as a database and reads/writes a lot.


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## james_ant

Ya I discovered this program the other day from the "why do gamers put 16gb ram" thread.

I don't understand why more people don't use this and max out with 16gb ram for games. 10-12gb ramdisk leaves you 4-6gb for system memory while giving your games 4k-6k read write speeds. Much faster than SSD's.

Everyone on this site should recommend people get 16gb ram for this reason alone.


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## Kramy

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *james_ant*
> 
> Everyone on this site should recommend people get 16gb ram for this reason alone.


Games don't hitch at all when loaded into a RAMdisk.







I'm enjoying it.

However, that said... it's not _required_ for most games. To be honest, the difference is barely noticeable in a lot of them. But something like a mod-heavy Oblivion would work well from a RAMdisk. (If you can fit it in there.







)

Even if you don't use imDisk, Windows 7 will cache lots of reads to RAM to allow instant re-access. I noticed that although my loadtimes are impressive from a RAMdisk, my re-load times match from RAMdisk, SSD, and HDD. That means Windows is caching about 2-6GB of game data (in addition to what the game is using) as soon as it's accessed, and until it has need for that memory.


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## james_ant

Why are some people talking about making a Pagefile on a ramdisk? I thought pagefiles on hard disks were meant to be a simple extension of the ram where there wasn't enough ram to begin with. So wouldn't making a page file on a ram partition be redundant?

Can someone explain this to me?


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## Sean Webster

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *james_ant*
> 
> Why are some people talking about making a Pagefile on a ramdisk? I thought pagefiles on hard disks were meant to be a simple extension of the ram where there wasn't enough ram to begin with. So wouldn't making a page file on a ram partition be redundant?
> 
> Can someone explain this to me?


They simply have low IQ's and do not understand what the page file is for.









Read this to understand more why to not use the RAMDisk for a page file: http://www.overclock.net/t/1193401/why-it-is-bad-to-store-the-page-file-on-a-ram-disk


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## coolhandluke41

I just installed DataRAM RAMDisk,any idea what this is about ?


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## Sean Webster

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *coolhandluke41*
> 
> I just installed DataRAM RAMDisk,any idea what this is about ?


You are using a old version of as ssd.

Try the newest one. Though it may happen again. I had the same thing happen. It is just the program.
http://alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4&file_id=9


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## coolhandluke41

same thing








EDIT ; here is CrystalDisk


*Thank you Sean*


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## Molybdenum

I followed the guide, but I keep getting a 0x1 error in task scheduler, so it neither saves my RAM disk nor is able to load it up at start up. It looks like 0x1 is pretty generic, any idea on how to fix it? I did exactly what the guide said, user account 'SYSTEM', run whether logged on or not, and run with highest privileges. I have a log-in password, could that be it?
Thanks
I fixed it... I changed folders around and the file path in the task scheduler was no longer the correct path to the start and save .cmd files


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## doveman

Thought I'd share the results of my tests. I should first point out that they're much slower than those done on Intel systems, as the RAM runs much slower on my Phenom II X4 955 system. Here's the MaxxMem RAM Benchmark results for reference:

DDR3-666 (1333) Mhz (9-9-9-24-1T), NB 2000Mhz:
Copy 10466 MB/s
Read 8107 MB/s
Write 6831 MB/s
Score 7.47GB/s
Latency 66.9 ns

I tried a few RAMDisk programs but I'll just give the results from RAMDisk Enterprise and IMDisk/awealloc.

This is my 10GB NTFS RAMDisk Enterprise disk in ATTO:


This is the 10GB NTFS RAMdisk Enterprise disk in CDM:


This is the 10GB NTFS IMDisk:



and this is the 10GB NTFS IMDisk using awealloc:


As you can see, IMDisk is quite a bit slower on the 4k results and the awealloc disk is even worse and also about 1/2 the speed on the Seq and 512k results. Nonetheless, it's still considerably faster than a HDD and about 3x faster than a SSD, so plenty fast enough to play games from or just for testing whether the relatively slow HDD speed is the cause of any problems in the game.

Despite being slower, between awealloc and IMDisk it seems awealloc is the only sensible choice, as the way IMDisk works means that the RAM used could be paged to the swapfile on HDD, rather defeating the purpose of a RAMDisk. Awealloc prevents this paging. Perhaps other RAMDisk software does as well but I don't know about that.


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## kevinf

How does the new http://www.radeonmemory.com/software_4.0.php compare? Anyone got some benches?


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## Sean Webster

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kevinf*
> 
> How does the new http://www.radeonmemory.com/software_4.0.php compare? Anyone got some benches?


AMDs is DataRAM RAMDisk with a AMD logo on it lol.

Softperfect RAM disk is what I would suggest if you dont use imdisk.


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## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *kevinf*
> 
> How does the new http://www.radeonmemory.com/software_4.0.php compare? Anyone got some benches?


All the benches you want are here
http://www.overclock.net/t/1381131/ramdisks-roundup-and-testing/0_20


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## Captivate

I'm getting a lot slower results than most people here.

Read Write
Seq 2709 3166
512K 2505 2874

With imDisk. Why is this?


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## Brokenstorm

Quote:


> Originally Posted by *Captivate*
> 
> I'm getting a lot slower results than most people here.
> 
> Read Write
> Seq 2709 3166
> 512K 2505 2874
> 
> With imDisk. Why is this?


ImDisk only allocates memory when needed, so you can do a full format to make sure memory is preallocated to the RAMDisk.
Also if you don't have enough RAM ImDisk may use the pagefile which would also result in slower results.


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## Captivate

I have 32GB of RAM and whether I make a 20GB or a 4GB or any size ImDisk, it will still be the same speed. I feel it should be a lot faster, no?


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## Brokenstorm

Yes, this is what I get with my [email protected]



not sure why your results are different.
Do you have an AV or something like that running?


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## Captivate

I actually have a new rig (X79) and that's how I got those results. Still not sure what's going on. Should be getting much higher results.


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## Captivate

These are the results I am getting now, with my RIVE (everything still stock) and memory at 1333mhz 9-9-9 timings.


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## Brokenstorm

Is that on a clean install?
Certain Anti-Virus intercepts all file operations so that might be the cause, otherwise I have no idea.
Even at stock your result should be close to mine if not faster.


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## Captivate

Yes, that is on a clean install. Everything is fresh.


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## Brokenstorm

The only other thing I can think of is make sure that SATA is set as AHCI or RAID in the BIOS and install the latest Rapid Storage drivers from Intel.

EDIT: or you could try SoftPerfect RAM Disk and test if you get similar results


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## nleksan

Are you sure that the memory is all good/problem free? Memtest?
Also,double check that the sticks are all in the proper slots, as you may be running a pair in single channel...? I don't know if that would cause these results, but worth a look.

I was getting significantly higher results (maybe 2x), but that's with 2248 9-11-10-27 1T...


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## Brokenstorm

Even with only 1 stick and even at 800MHz, I was still getting very comparable results. From my tests processor speed seems to be the main if not only thing that affects a RAMDisk performance.
Maybe his processor goes into a low power mode or put cores to sleep.


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## nleksan

I have all the C-States disabled, but looking back through my notes I actually did change the CPU overclock between runs :S I had one with an overclock of 100bclk * 47x Multi, and the faster run was with 106.40bclk * 48multi.... Not exactly comparable results, my bad.


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## Totocellux

I would suggest freeware SoftPerfect RAM Disk

These are my rig and results:


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## Chozo4

*ImDisk -- open source RAM drive with no size limitations* - the title tends to be a misnomer when it comes to 32-bit windows as depending how much ram you have.. (4gb, 8gb, 16gb, etc) you can only get as much as 1.9gb per IMDisk based ram drive. This is due to how IMDisk handles the ram itself through loading into contingent blocks of ram and that it doesn't seem to be PAE-Aware. Thought I would put that up here for others that aren't aware of this limitation.

As for the claim it is all manual, you can automate the loading of an IMDisk drive using the command line parameters for it. For example...

Code:



Code:


imdisk -a -s 32M -m Z: -p "/a:512 /v:RamDisk /fs:NTFS /X /Y"

...Will automatically create a 32MB ramdrive on Drive Z: and then auto-format it to an NTFS Compressed Ramdisk with 512byte clusters.

If you wish to have a ramdisk auto-load with windows as part of the boot procedure instead of pre-user login, you can use [ _*Gavotte Ramdisk*_ ] for that up to any size you wish as well. That in itself is literally a 'setit and forget' procedure with its' own install UI.


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## legoman786

Ok. Wow. I'm gonna need to look into this myself. Especially when I get around to upgrading my RAM... Because OCN that's why.


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## shadman

Yeah, its just really unfortunate that RAM prices are as high as they are now. I took advantage of the low prices a bit ago, but my friends were slow to the uptake and now are spending almost twice as much as I did.


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## illli

interesting tool


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