What is RAMDisk?
RAMDisk is a program that takes a portion of your system memory and uses it as a disk drive.
Sounds simple? In concept yes, but in practice there are many tricky issues to deal with when operating a RAMDisk in Windows. We continue to work hard to make RAMDisk as easy as possible to use, but there is always room for improvement. We provide updates regularly to improve features and address customer requests. Please be sure to READ THE INSTRUCTIONS (this document) before you try the various RAMDisk settings.
How does it work?
RAMDisk is a kernel-level driver that presents a standard disk drive to the OS, however, it stores and retrieves data from the system RAM on your motherboard instead of an actual, physical disk. Along with the Kernel Driver is a GUI that talks to the driver and allows the user to set various options as well as start and stop the Driver (create or delete a RAMDisk).
The Driver has been written to WDM standards and creates a low-level disk object that Windows Device Manager and Disk Management are able to "see" and manage. You can partition, format, mount a volume, and assign multiple drive letters to RAMDisk (but only if you would know how to do those things with a regular disk, RAMDisk does not do it for you).
Upon successful Start of the RAMDisk, a kernel level driver (RAMDisk.sys) is loaded into the Windows/System32/drivers folder. This driver will be available to Windows each time RAMDisk starts. It is removed when RAMDisk is stopped.
What is the benefit?
In a word: SPEED!
Most users use RAMDisk to speed up applications like:
Browsers cache
RAM Cache for the HDD or SSD
Photoshop (scratch disk)
Databases
Internet Explorer cache for faster web surfing
Audio and Video editing
CAD programs
Software compilers
Speeding up CD duplication
Games
SETI processing
TEMP files
Swap space
Web server cache
Custom applications with high I/O, high bandwidth, or high security requirements
When I transfer 2GB file from the RAMdisc to my 2TB HDD it starts high around 1.2GB/s the transfer speed.
Than it goes down of course, but it takes -> one, two done!