Is RAM Drive faster than SSD? 5 Things to Know

Has your PC slowed down and is unable to even run basic tasks smoothly! In the age when smartphones and other mobile devices run faster than ever, who would want to work on a PC that lags in terms of speed! Chances are that you must be looking out for options to speed up your desktop system. Now the question is that how to do so!

You can speed up the otherwise sluggish desktop by upgrading its hardware to the more powerful internals, and can improve the reading and writing file speed by doing a simple software tweak. All you have to do is to upgrade the RAM drive or RAM disk. Yes, that's right! A simple change can fasten up your computer. The best part is that it only needs your existing system resources, hence saving you from spending much.

However, if you are wondering if the RAM drive is good enough to improve system speed or works better than the SSD, read on to get answers to your questions:

What is RAM drive?

To begin with, it is important to understand what RAM drive is. A RAM drive is a virtual drive that uses your system's RAM like a disk to deliver faster performance than either a traditional hard drive or even a solid state drive. It essentially fastens the read and write speeds than the traditional storage space.

How to get it?

The RAM drive is not something that you can buy from a store and install in your computer. To set RAM drive up, you can install simple software, such as SoftPerfect RAMDisk on Windows or RAMDisk Manager on Mac. Once downloaded, you can choose the size of the drive. It uses system RAM, and the memory that you allocate to it will not be able to function as the standard RAM.

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What are the advantages of RAM Drive over SSD?

Here are the major advantages of using RAM drive over SSD or hard drive:

1. There are many advantages of using a RAM drive. The most important and noticeable change is that it speeds up read and write functions. You can notice a considerable improvement in speed on using RAM drive, as it works much faster than the built-in SSD or hard drive.

2. You can feel the difference in speed and performance when working with very big files like high-res videos and heavy graphics.

3. In addition to the aforementioned, RAM generates less heat.

4. Moreover, it doesn't wear over time, unlike the definite limit of cycles that most physical drives have.

5. There are security advantages of using RAM drive, considering that it erases cached data such as app caches or browser cache, when a computer's power supply is cut off.

SEE ALSO:5 Warning Signals That Your Hard Disk Is About to Crash

Limitations of RAM drive:

There is no doubt about it that RAM disk is much better than an SSD for speed, but it is not ideal for all tasks and for everyone. Here's why:

1. You can store certain files or applications on it to boost up their performance, but the RAM drive is not ideal choice of storage for everything, especially important files and data. The cached data stored on RAM drive is temporary and goes away when you restart your system.

2. With RAM drive, you are limited to a relatively low capacity. Hence, you can't save much or have a higher size RAM drive considering that most household desktops have less than 8GB RAM, rarely would these have 16GB of RAM.