Corsair blog

In my previous blog on 32GB memory caching perfromance I showed how using 16GB of memory to setup a RAM cache gave huge performance improvements in several benchmarks. A RAM disk is very similar to the RAM cache, however it sets itself up as a separate disk with its own drive letter. To use a RAM disk you will need to manually copy the files to the RAM disk partition. One advantage the RAM disk has over a RAM cache is the write speeds. Using a RAM disk you are only writing to RAM, with a RAM cache you are writing to the RAM and the SSD or HDD. Again I used software from SuperSpeed however this time I used RAMDisk Plus. I set my RAM disk up to use 16GB of memory from the 32GB Vengeance® DDR3 memory kit I used in this test.

PCMark Vantage saw a slight decrease in the overall suite score when using the RAM disk instead of the RAM cache, but this is due to the software scoring a secondary drive lower. The HDD Suite score doubled thanks to the faster write speeds to the RAM disk.  

Anvil’s Storage Utilities also saw a huge increase in overall performance thanks to the faster write speeds. The read speeds and IOPS did decrease though.

ATTO also saw a huge increase in write speeds with 4x the performance over the RAM cache with an SSD. However once again the read speeds were slightly slower.

Crystal Disk Mark showed improvements to both reads and writes. However the sequential read improvements were minimal. The biggest differences can be seen in the sequential writes and the 4K QD32 writes.

Using both RAM cache and RAM drives can give you huge performance improvements. However they both have their pros and cons. The RAM disk has amazing write performance, however you do have to put everything onto a second drive letter. The RAM cache is really good at read speeds and you do not have to manually move files over. If you are only reading data a RAM cache may work best for you. If you need the write performance the RAM disk might be the better direction to head.