AMD Pitches Free RAMDisk Trial

News
By Wolfgang Gruener
published

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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Wolfgang Gruener
40 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Warsaw
    Sweet none-the-less, good job on promoting something that is a huge speed boost in some instances.
    Reply
  • amuffin
    Well, it's a start. We'll get there one day. :)
    Reply
  • uglynerdman
    but will it help you run crysis?
    Reply
  • joytech22
    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.
    Reply
  • Robert Pankiw
    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.)
    Reply
  • Onihikage
    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).
    Reply
  • merikafyeah
    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.
    Reply
  • Firion87
    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.
    Reply
  • martel80
    20 bucks for a RAM drive SW in 2012??? Is that some kind of a joke? :)
    Reply
  • goodguy713
    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 ..

    Reply