AMD Pitches Free RAMDisk Trial

AMD has begun promoting its partnership with Ramdisk, a developer of memory solutions as well as the Ramdisk Software, which enables PC users to allocate RAM as a virtual RAM drive.

There is a free "trial" offer to download the software, though the software appears to be the freeware version (without a time limit) of Ramdisk that is offered on Ramdisk's website, anyway.

However, there is a twist as those users who run AMD-branded memory can extended the virtual Ramdisk to 6 GB, instead of just 4 GB. If you want to go beyond 4 or 6 GB, you will have to purchase the personal version of the software, which is available for $19.

AMD promises that users could see a speedup of up to 1,700 percent when compared to HDD performance and achieve data transfer rates of up to 25,600 MB/s with DDR3-1600 memory. These are, of course, theoretical values.

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Top Comments

24

joytech22 , October 11, 2012 12:49 PM

If you have a server, stick 256GB of RAM on the mobo, make a 128GB RAM Drive.
Store all your game servers on the drive.

Watch as nobody complains about performance or map load times. :3 Until a power outage wipes it clean and you lose your servers. lol.

Whenever I play online I boast about how the server loads slower than my machine does.
But if someone did this, I'd be dumbfounded by the load times. lol.
14

amuffin , October 11, 2012 12:40 PM

Well, it's a start. We'll get there one day.

Other Comments

9

Warsaw , October 11, 2012 12:35 PM

Sweet none-the-less, good job on promoting something that is a huge speed boost in some instances.
14

amuffin , October 11, 2012 12:40 PM

Well, it's a start. We'll get there one day.
-21

uglynerdman , October 11, 2012 12:40 PM

but will it help you run crysis?
24

joytech22 , October 11, 2012 12:49 PM

If you have a server, stick 256GB of RAM on the mobo, make a 128GB RAM Drive.
Store all your game servers on the drive.

Watch as nobody complains about performance or map load times. :3 Until a power outage wipes it clean and you lose your servers. lol.

Whenever I play online I boast about how the server loads slower than my machine does.
But if someone did this, I'd be dumbfounded by the load times. lol.
7

Robert Pankiw , October 11, 2012 12:59 PM

I understand that a lot of people on here are gamers, but, wouldn't this help people who do a lot of picture editing? Use the RAMDISK as your scratch partition, it gets saved to hard disk (or SSD) infrequently, letting your drive last longer. Of course I assume you are using either an UPS or a laptop so not even power outage would really effect your work. RAMDISK would allow you to load large movies much faster too, wouldn't it? Maybe we can see how much faster an application works with RAMDISK? (Obviously synthetics would be leaps ahead, so real world testing could be nice.)
6

Onihikage , October 11, 2012 1:06 PM

This article is ironic for me. I've been using the normal trial of RAMDisk to run Firefox for a few weeks now, but ultimately decided to stop using it because everything started to freeze and stutter worse than it ever had from my HDD. Yet after moving Firefox to my HDD, this article is literally the first thing I see when I start it up again and go to my feeds.

I don't know why I had issues with RAMDisk, perhaps a driver or hardware issue. Whatever it was, I can live without RAMDisk for a while (at least until I scrape together the money for an SSD).
0

merikafyeah , October 11, 2012 1:11 PM

I prefer Primo Ramdisk. It's very stable, and I find that its driver is more efficient than others, which you can tell by benchmarking your ramdisk drives with software like Anvil's SSD benchmark.
0

Firion87 , October 11, 2012 1:48 PM

Tried it on my laptop. Doesn't seem to give me any speed bump for games at all (DDR3@1033MHz). Ain't gonna try it on my pc, because I got there a ssd installed.
9

martel80 , October 11, 2012 2:10 PM

20 bucks for a RAM drive SW in 2012??? Is that some kind of a joke?
2

goodguy713 , October 11, 2012 2:12 PM

Firion87Tried it on my laptop. Doesn't seem to give me any speed bump for games at all (DDR3@1033MHz). Ain't gonna try it on my pc, because I got there a ssd installed.

It might load a game even faster then an ssd drive but with out a decent graphics card its pointless not to mention your direct x files are stored in a seperate folder so installing a game on a ram disk is rather hard to do ..
0

Firion87 , October 11, 2012 2:17 PM

goodguy713

ahhhh, got it. Didn't know that. Thanks!
3

hp79 , October 11, 2012 2:20 PM

I also tried one of these RAMDisk software couple months back. I removed it because it was causing more problems than adding any benefits. This was for both desktop and laptop with SSD.
1

The_Prophecy , October 11, 2012 2:33 PM

I use Primo RAMDisk on my main desktop with 64GB of ram and load Diablo 3, Guild Wars 2, and Star Trek Online into it (not all at once though). Very noticeable difference in load times when running these games from the ram drive. As a free alternative, ImDisk works very well too. No size limit under 64 Bit operating systems with ImDisk either.
2

techcurious , October 11, 2012 2:44 PM

I think since the introduction of SSD, RAMDisks are not as useful given their small size (unless you invest in gobs of RAM) and volatility.
1

teodoreh , October 11, 2012 3:06 PM

Damn, I had RAMDisk on my Amiga before 1.5 decade! Who knows, after 40 years they may discover localize and HAM too!
0

teodoreh , October 11, 2012 3:06 PM

...and Rexx too!
2

memadmax , October 11, 2012 3:15 PM

joytech22If you have a server, stick 256GB of RAM on the mobo, make a 128GB RAM Drive.Store all your game servers on the drive.Watch as nobody complains about performance or map load times. :3 Until a power outage wipes it clean and you lose your servers. lol.Whenever I play online I boast about how the server loads slower than my machine does.But if someone did this, I'd be dumbfounded by the load times. lol.

If ur running servers like this then you will have UPS and battery backed up RAM(the RAM maintains it's contents and refresh until power is restored)
2

billgatez , October 11, 2012 3:22 PM

Arent there tones of free RAM disks around thet go over 4 GB.
Id like to also see a RAM drive that mirror's the data to a drive. so there's a back up.
0

merikafyeah , October 11, 2012 3:53 PM

billgatezArent there tones of free RAM disks around thet go over 4 GB. Id like to also see a RAM drive that mirror's the data to a drive. so there's a back up.

Primo Ramdisk has image mirroring so you never have to worry about power outages wiping your data. In addition to automatically loading your ramdisk data at startup, it has options to update the mirror at an interval of your choosing, or you can choose realtime mirroring.
2

digiex , October 11, 2012 4:39 PM

The problem of windows, it has lots of locations of virtual storage, Pagefile, temp in the profiles folder, temp file in the windows directory, other programs put their temp storage it in their profiles folder, and its pain in the ass to unify all the temp locations, and some programs don't run if you change their temp storage.

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