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- Iramdisk 3 0 0 – Create A Ram Disk Drive
- Iramdisk 3 0 0 – Create A Ram Disk Recovery
- Iramdisk 3 0 0 – Create A Ram Disk Drives
- Iramdisk 3 0 0 – Create A Ram Disk Hard Drive
- Here is a list of best free RAMDisk software for Windows.These freeware let you create virtual disk drive on your computer to juice up your computer’s performance. This memory is taken from your computer’s RAM, so more RAM lets you create larger RAMDisk.Of course, you can’t use all of the RAM to create virtual memory, but you can use a significant part of it depending upon your RAM’s.
- RAM Disk for Windows Increase computer performance and SSD life span. SoftPerfect RAM Disk is a high-performance RAM disk application that lets you have a disk on your computer entirely stored in its memory. As the memory is much faster than physical hard disks, storing temporary data on a fast in-memory disk achieves a higher performance.
RAMDisk is Freeware (up to 1GB disk size). It creates a virtual RAM drive, or block of memory, which your computer treats as if it were a disk drive. By storing files and programs into memory, you can speed up internet load times and disk-to-disk activities, accelerate databases and reduce compile times.
This tutorial will show you how to quickly create a RAM disk in any Linux distro (Debian, Ubuntu, Linux, Fedora, Arch Linux, CentOS, etc). Compared to commercial Windows RAM disk software that costs money, Linux can utilize this cool feature 100% free of charge.
What is RAM Disk?
RAM disk is also known as RAM drive. It’s a portion of your RAM that are formated with a file system. You can mount it to a directory on your Linux system and use it as a disk partition.
Why use RAM disk?
RAM is ultra-fast compared to even the fastest solid state drive (SSD). Untitled goose game 1 0 7. As you may know, the main performance bottleneck in today’s computer is the speed of hard drive, so moving programs and files to the RAM disk yields super fast computing experience.
Pros of RAM disk:
- Ultra-fast
- Can sustain countless reads and writes
Cons of RAM disk:
- RAM is volatile which means all data in RAM disk will be lost when the computer shutdowns or reboots. However, this can be a pro in some situations, if you use it wisely.
- RAM is expensive so it has limited capacity. You need to make sure not allocate too much space for RAM disk, or the operating system would run out of RAM.
You can do a lot of interesting things with RAM disk.
- RAM disk is best suited for temporary data or caching directories, such as Nginx FastCGI cache. If you use a SSD and there will be a lot of writes to a particular directory, you can mount that directory as a RAM disk to reduce wear out of SSD.
- I also use RAM disk to temporary store screenshots when writing articles on this blog, so when my computer shut down, those screenshots will automatically be deleted on my computer.
- You may not believe it, but I use RAM disk to run virtual machines inside VirtualBox. My SSD is about 250G. I can’t run many VMs directly on the SSD and I’m not happy about the speed of my 2TB mechanical hard drive (HDD). I can move the VM from HDD to RAM disk before starting the VM, so the VM can run much faster. After shutting down the VM, I move the VM files back to HDD, which takes less than 1 minute. This of course requires your computer to have a large capacity RAM.
How to Create a RAM Disk in Any Linux Distro
First make a directory which can be anywhere in the file system such as
If you want to let every user on your Linux system use the RAM disk, then change its permission to 777.
Next, check how much free RAM are left on your system with
htop
command line utility because we don’t want to use too much RAM.Then all left to do is to specify the file system type, RAM disk size, device name and mount it to the above directory. You can see from the screenshot above that I have plenty of free RAM, so I can easily allocate 1GB for my RAM disk. This can be done with the following one-liner. It will be using
tmpfs
file system and its size is set to 1024MB. myramdisk
is the device name I gave to it.To allocate 10G for the RAM disk, run this instead.
If we issue the following command
News explorer 1 4 2. We can see it’s successfully mounted.
Now if I copy my VirtualBox machines file (5.8G) into the RAM disk, my RAM usage suddenly goes up to 9.22G.
If I unmount RAM disk,
Everything in that directory will be lost and RAM usage goes down to original.
This is how you can test if your RAM disk is working.
Test RAM Disk Speed
To test write speed of RAM disk, you can use dd utility.
Which gave me 2.8GB/s write speed.
To test read speed, run:
Which gave me 3.1 GB/s read speed.
I also did a speed test on my SSD. The write speed is 534MB/s and read speed 1.6GB/s.
Auto-mount on System Boot
Edit
/etc/fstab
file.Add an entry like this:
x-gvfs-show
will let you see your RAM disk in file manager. Save and close the file. Your Linux system will automatically mount the RAM disk when your computer boots up.Iramdisk 3 0 0 – Create A Ram Disk Drive
To mount it immediately without reboot, run the following command.
How to Run VirtualBox VM on RAM Disk
Note that this requires a large-capacity RAM.
When you create a brand new virtual machine, you should set the machine folder to the RAM disk directory (
/tmp/ramdisk/
). If you can’t find the Machine folder option, then you need to install the latest version of Virtualbox on your system.If you have an existing VM, then select the VM in the main VirtualBox Manager window and go to the menu bar and select Machine -> Move, or right-click the VM and select Move from the context menu. You will be prompted to choose a new folder for the virtual machine. Select
/tmp/ramdisk/
as the new folder.Remember to move your VM back to the original folder before shutting down your computer, or your VM will be deleted.
Wrapping Up
And that’s the basics of creating RAM disk in Linux. If you found this post useful, then subscribe to our free newsletter or follow us Twitter or like our Facebook page. Thanks for visiting!
Bilou_Gateux has asked how to create a ramdisk from an ISO file from command line, so here is the command line I've used - maybe Olof can correct if needed.You can find this question here:
http://www.911cd.net..&..st&p=131441
Command line to create a brand new ramdisk (empty):
Where:
-a --> attach (add)
-s 10M --> size = 10Mb
-m e: --> mount drive as e:
You still need to format this drive with the filesystem you wish (NTFS, FAT32, etc.)
To unload this drive use:
Be sure that the drive isn't being used by another program (like having explorer open on drive e:) so that imdisk can sucessfully lock this volume and then remove it safely.
To mount an ISO image:
Where:
-a --> attach
-f c:image.iso --> image file
Iramdisk 3 0 0 – Create A Ram Disk Recovery
-m e: --> mount as drive letter
Iramdisk 3 0 0 – Create A Ram Disk Drives
To further understand the command line of ImDisk I recommend just typing 'imdisk' from command line read each one of the options.
You can use these examples to get started and then move on to more parameters as you get familiar with the syntax.