When we think of RAMDisks, the first thing that comes to mind is that if the power is cut, data is lost and so we tend to steer clear of anything that attempts to place our precious files into volatile memory.

AMD believes, however, that RAMDisks are more relevant now than ever and that they have the potential to seriously enhance our PC experience. As such, AMD has teamed-up with specialist firm, Dataram, to launch the AMD Radeon RAMDisk and RAMDisk Xtreme software suites.

The former will allow users to automatically create disks of up to 4GB in RAM for free, whilst the latter, which can be had for ~$20, will allow users to automatically create virtual storage of up to 64GB. It's perhaps worth noting that owners of Radeon-branded memory, which the company launched earlier this year, will be able to squeeze 6GB out of the free edition.

Advantages over a standard spinning disk are clear:

Gaming up to 1,700 per cent faster

Significantly faster general performance - read performance up to 25.6GB/s with DDR3-1600 RAM

With SSDs all-the-rage right now, the extra speed offered by RAMDisks may seem unnecessary, however, there are very real advantages to adopting a RAMDisk:

Keep temporary files and saves off the SSD - extending drive life

SSDs can dump data into RAM at incredible speeds, reducing the time it takes to prepare a RAMDisk after boot For those who wish to give AMD's Radeon RAMDisk a try, you can head over to the following link and, please, let us hear about your experiences: www.radeonramdisk.com





An example of a RAMDisk implementation