RAMDisk 4.4.0 RC 31

RAMDisk is a kernel-level driver that presents itself as a standard disk drive to the O/S. However, it stores and retrieves data from the system RAM (main memory) on your system instead of an actual, physical hard disk. Along with the Kernel Driver is a GUI that talks to the driver and allows the user to set various options, as well as start and stop the Driver. RAMDisk is created via the GUI.

The Driver has been written to Windows Device Manager standards and creates a low-level disk object that WDM and Disk Management are able to “see” and manage. You can partition, format, mount a volume, and assign multiple drive letters to RAMDisk, but only if you would know how to do these operations with a regular disk. RAMDisk does not do it for you.

RAMDisk is the right product for you if you have a disk I/O bound application that is small enough to fit in main memory. RAMDisk is also great for storing frequently accessed data such as temp files, page files and database index files, and is great for accelerating online gaming.

Dataram RAMDisk cannot make use of memory that is not available in 32-bit Windows systems between 3 and 4 GB. RAMDisk can use memory not “seen” by 32-bit Windows ABOVE 4 GB, i.e. 6 or 8GB and more. The licensed version of RAMDisk is required, utilizing the “Advanced” tab for configuration.

To use the “High Memory” option, you need:

processor with PAE (Physical Address Extensions), most modern CPUs support this
PAE enabled (this is an option in some BIOS versions)
more than 4096 MB physical memory
an operating system that does not use memory above the 4GB barrier
no 64-bit OS is supported (all RAM is directly accessible on these systems)
all 32-bit desktop versions of Windows are supported
Server 2008 and later is not supported
Advanced Server versions (Datacenter, Enterprise, and Storage Enterprise) are not supported
Windows Server 2003 Standard, Small Business, Web, Storage, etc are supported

The various OS versions that are not supported all use memory above the 4GB limit in some way, making it unsafe to access this memory directly.