Storage speed (and space, of course) has increased tremendously in recent years. Traditional hard drives are practically obsolete thanks to the arrival of SSDs, and some already exceed 7,000 MB / s of reading. Prices have also dropped, but even so the faster SSDs are still out of reach for many users … and this is where RAM Disks come in . In this article we are going to tell you what they are, as well as whether it is worth creating one to improve gaming performance.
Although everyone considers SSDs as the fastest piece of storage that exists with current technology, the reality is that they are not, since RAM is much faster than any SSD, although it is true that We are talking about volatile memory that will lose data when we turn off the computer. RAM Disks really have more disadvantages than advantages, but we are going to explain what they are and what they contribute before getting into that.
What is a RAM Disk?
The first thing you should know is that you should not mistake a RAM Disk for a RAM Drive . RAM Drives are hardware devices that allow you to connect RAM memory modules to sockets generally PCI-Express to use them as storage devices, and the fact is that with a RAM Drive you can create RAM Disks, but they are different things.
A RAM Disk is a virtual storage unit that can be created by software using RAM. Basically, you are telling the operating system to reserve a part of the RAM to use as storage so that it can read and write to it as if it were a hard drive or SSD. RAM can be up to 10 times faster than an SSD, so this should bring some great performance, right?
Decades ago, PCs had almost no storage capacity, and the idea of having a dedicated hard drive was almost a dream. The first consumer hard drives were introduced in 1980, had 5MB capacity, and cost about $ 1,500 in those days (before that most data was stored on floppy disks). In addition to being so small, hard drives were extremely slow compared to what we have today, so in an attempt to increase speed and load games and programs faster, RAM Disks were invented to get around this limitation of speed.
What are the advantages and disadvantages? Is it worth it for gaming?
In a sense, a RAM Disk is a type of solid state drive since it has no mechanical parts, but as we have said before it has a much higher speed than an SSD. A RAM module operating at 2666 MT / s (mega transfers per second) is the equivalent of 21,328 MB / s (megabytes per second) or about 21.33 GB / s. In comparison, the fastest SSDs on the market operate at 7 GB / s, so of course the main advantage is immeasurable performance.
However, this does not mean that the games and programs will load immediately, as reading the files from the storage device is only part of the task of loading a game. That’s why most SSDs cut load time in half at best, and we’ve already seen that even though an NVMe SSD is ten times faster than a SATA 3 SSD, it doesn’t actually cut too much loading times. All the processing of what the files contain actually creates a huge bottleneck .
On the other hand, as you know, RAM memory is volatile, and that means that even if you can save files on a RAM Disk, the moment you turn off the computer or there is a power failure, you will lose everything (there are ways to dump what contain the RAM Disk to the normal hard disk when you shut down the computer, but that also slows the startup and shutdown quite a bit). That also means that if you want to avoid the downside of RAM being volatile memory, it will greatly penalize your PC’s startup and shutdown time.
Another reason using these types of tools is problematic is that many consumer-grade motherboards only support up to 64GB of total capacity (let’s not talk about triple-A games that take up more than 100GB, they literally won’t fit in one of these. discs); If you have to leave at least 8-16 GB for your normal activity, the capacity you can allocate for the RAM Drive is greatly reduced, and it would be absurd to invest in a very expensive 128 GB RAM kit, for example, when you have SATA SSDs 3 of 1 TB capacity for less than 100 euros.
Although the theoretical speed offered by this type of “disks” may seem tempting, the reality is that the loss of data that can be suffered, the increase in startup and shutdown times and the cost in money that they have make it not worth it. it’s worth not even considering it for a gaming PC. A couple of decades ago they had their reason for being, but not today.
A utility that a RAM Disk could have would be as additional cache memory for the operating system, but as long as it is with RAM “apart” from the normal system, that is, using a RAM Drive. Otherwise it wouldn’t make sense either because Windows already uses your system RAM as a cache.
