So, while it may be possible to run Windows entirely in memory for ultimate performance, some hardware issues will have to be ironed out beforehand. However, SSD technology came along and changed the game. One of the issues you would run into, though, would be that you would need to plug it into a slot that is bandwidth-constrained, negating any performance gains. You could fill that with cheap memory and use it as a traditional hard disk drive. Intriguingly, it – as well as a number of other vendors like Adata and Gigabyte – used to sell physical RAM disk drives as well, which had a battery and memory slots. And that’s HyperOS 2016 (opens in new tab) whose tagline is “One Windows is not enough”.

To our knowledge, there’s only one piece of software that will allow you to clone your Windows installation, use it and destroy it after use. Older computers are more likely to benefit from it, especially those with a hard disk drive and plenty of memory like old servers or workstations. Unlike most upgrades, a RAM disk is technically free you just decide on allocating your computer’s resources differently. In our test though, we saw no real difference between exFAT and NTFS. There is an upper limit to the memory’s bandwidth, plus there is some overhead in RAID-0 processing – as it's done in-software within the operating system.Īs a spokesperson for Softperfect (opens in new tab), another popular RAM disk software developer puts it, the best and fastest way is to use a regular RAM disk without Hard Disk Emulation and with an exFAT file system. by putting multiple RAM disks in a RAID array? Sadly no. We created a RAM disk array on the Eurocom Tornado F7W (opens in new tab) mobile workstation (it comes with 128GB of RAM) and we hit read/write speeds of up to 8.7/15.8GBps, that’s a speed improvement of up to 30 times (at least according to CrystalDiskMark)!Ĭould we have gone even further? Perhaps. Starting with as little as 4GB of memory, you can install frequently-accessed applications (check our list of portable software) that will benefit from phenomenally high read and write speeds, which in theory would mean faster load times and far snappier performance.Ī SATA SSD will reach about 500MBps in read/write speeds. Of course, the reason why you'd want to use a RAM disk is because it is fast – absurdly fast.

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