How to Create a RAMDisk in Windows 10/11 [Detailed Guide]

If you notice that your computer generally has some amount of RAM space freely available at all times, even while you are working, you can implement a RAM disk. A RAM disk can be extremely helpful, primarily if you work in a creative field such as video editing, digital art, or 3D modeling. In general, a RAM Disk can be advantageous for any user. For example, if your system has 16 GB of RAM and is always idle, using around 10 GB of RAM during maximum software usage, you can utilize the extra 6 GB to create a virtual disk.

Since RAM is way faster than hard drives and solid-state drives, a RAM disk can give you great benefits in terms of read/write performance. This virtual drive, also known as a RAM disk, can be used for general storage, but it will serve as a high-speed and low-latency storage medium.

Generally, you don’t have direct access or control over your system’s RAM. The operating system and the CPU control the RAM. But the RAM disk allows you to use your RAM for reading, writing, and storing data.

Although you are creating a virtual storage drive from your RAM, it can’t be used for permanent storage because RAM is volatile memory. If you have stored some critical data on the RAM disk and your system is turned off, you will lose all your data. So, before a shutdown, all the content of the RAM disk can be stored on your system drive if you choose to.

Let’s discuss the RAM Disk in more detail and explore its implementation.

How to Set Up a RAM Disk Using ImDisk?

Creating a RAM Disk in Windows without AutoSave and Auto-Mount

1. First, download the ImDisk software from here and install it on your Windows computer. Two other good software are SoftPerfect RAM Disk and AMD Radeon™ RAMDisk. However, I am going to use ImDisk because of its simplicity.
2. Once ImDisk is installed, you will see three new programs on your desktop: ImDisk Virtual Drive, ImDisk Configuration, and Mount Image File.

The ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver will be used to manage the virtual disks along with the RAM disks. Additionally, this tool will be used to create RAM Disks. The RAMDisk Configuration tool allows you to configure general settings, including drive configurations, as well as enable auto-saving, which we will discuss further. The Mount Image File tool will be used to mount the existing disk image files (ISO, VHD, etc) as virtual drives.

3. You just fire up the ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver and click the Mount New button in the menu.

4. Choose a drive letter for your RAM disk (e.g., D:, E:, or F:). You just leave the Image File section empty if you don’t want to create a RAM disk from an image file. Select the size of your virtual disk in the second input section. To demonstrate, I am creating a 2GB RAM Disk and assigning it the name D:. You can leave everything as it is and click Ok.
5. Now, in the mounted drives list, you can see your new drive. You’ll also get the option to remove, format, and extend your RAM Disk.

But, if I go to my Windows Explorer and look at the new D: drive, it isn’t ready to use. For that, I’ll have to format it first. You can format it from the Disk Driver menu or Windows Explorer itself. I’ll just double-click the D: drive, and it will ask for a format. Just quickly format it, and it will be ready for your job.

You can also create the RAM disk using the RAM Disk Configuration tool, which is a simpler option. The performance will be the same, but with the drive created with the configuration tool, the RAM disk might not be handled by the ImDisk software directly. Instead, it will act as a proxy while the different backend processes handle the data and everything else. You also get additional features, which are given in the next section.

Creating a RAM Disk in Windows without AutoSave and Auto-Mount

1. Now, for this method, we are going to use the RAM Disk Configuration tool from the desktop. Just fire up this tool and enter the basic details about your drive, like its name and size. I am again creating a 2GB RAM Disk with the D: drive name.

High-Performance vs Low-Performance RAM Disk

In the configuration menu, you can either allocate memory dynamically or just occupy the whole RAM Disk in memory all the time. I prefer to keep it unchecked to ensure the drive offers full performance and is always ready for its task. If you choose to allocate memory dynamically, it will reduce the performance but save memory space if you have a limited memory capacity. However, just by creating the RAM Disk without dynamic memory allocation, you will see a 2GB RAM usage spike, and it will stay there because you have allocated 2GB for the RAM disk, which is now unavailable as system memory.

2. Now, go to the data tab in this menu, and choose an image file location in your main drive where the data will be stored before your system shuts down. Also, make sure to tick the option Synchronize at System Shutdown.

3. A new tab will open with a Windows dialog to change the drive properties like its name and other things. I will keep everything as it is.

4. This time, you don’t have to format your drive, and it will be ready to use in Windows Explorer.

With this drive, your system will synchronize all stored data into the image folder (on your primary drive) before shutting down. Also, it will load all the data when your system boots up. However, I found a huge increase in the boot-up time with this auto-save and synchronization feature. As I tried with a larger RAM Disk size and more data on it, both booting and startup times continued to increase.

Running the Benchmarks

Let’s see how our RAM Disk performs on CDM tests. Here are the results for the default peak performance CDM profile.

Here are the results for the Real-World performance profile.

Key Benefits of RAM Disk

1. High-Speed Performance:

RAM disk operations are much faster than HDDs or SSDs because it is based on capacitor storage, which is much quicker than the regular permanent storage drives. While the fastest NVMe drives can offer sequential read/write speeds in the range of 10,000 to 12,000 MB/s, modern RAM can operate at speeds up to 30,000 MB/s or more. This makes RAM disks ideal for tasks that require fast access to data, such as loading large files, databases, video files, or virtual machines.

2. Reduced I/O Latency:

I/O (Input/Output) latency is the delay between a request for data and its retrieval from the storage medium. RAM has extremely low latency compared to SSDs and HDDs. So, the data will be available nearly instantly. This can significantly improve performance for tasks where frequent and rapid data access is crucial, such as file modification, video editing, and software development.

3. No Disk Wear:

SSDs come with a limited number of Read/Write (Program/Erase) cycles before they can become unusable. Hard drives also wear out with time. But RAM has no mechanical parts, and excessive read/write operations aren’t destructive for the RAM cells. Therefore, the RAM disk becomes an ideal solution for short-term storage space that requires high-frequency read/write operations.

4. Improved System Performance:

You get significant benefits in software and tasks that demand heavy and fast disk usage. This includes gaming, video editing, database management, virtual machines, etc. Additionally, a RAM disk can be energy-efficient in most cases because even heavy read/write tasks, which would take a long time on SSDs and HDDs, can be completed within seconds. Especially in random read/write operations, a RAM disk can be very impressive.

Drawbacks Reminder:

As discussed earlier, since RAM is volatile memory, all data in a RAM disk will be lost when the system is powered off unless you have set up an auto-save feature with an image file in the primary memory. It is always important to save important data if it is stored on a RAM disk.

Additionally, setting up a RAM disk can be tricky for some people. We typically use third-party software to make it easier for us, except in Linux, where you have built-in functionality for RAMDisk.

The third drawback is that when you set up the autosave feature with the RAM Disk, it increases the booting and shutdown timings. This is because the data saved on the RAM Disk should first be written the permanent storage before the system shuts down. Depending on your primary storage drive — HDD or SSD —this process could take significantly longer, and until the data is saved, your system will not shut down. The same data will be loaded back to the RAM disk when you turn on your computer. This will increase the booting time as well.

Who should create a RAM Disk?

RAM disks are generally preferred by power users who use resource-intensive applications, such as video editing, databases, 3D modeling, and VFX. High-performance gaming setups can also utilize a RAM Disk. Developers who test applications can utilize a RAM Disk to accelerate file operations. Data analysts, programmers, overclockers, or anyone working with random data more frequently can make use of the RAM Disk. Even if you are a normal user involved in moving heavy or large files often, RAM disks can greatly assist you with this task.

I hope this helps.