The speed at which systems and applications run on a computer is affected by the hardware configuration, and one of the computer components that plays a decisive role in this issue is the hard disk drive. In addition to traditional HDDs and now common SSDs, there is a virtual disk called RAM disk. It is created from a part of the physical memory installed on the computer, and it has the advantage of being much faster (hundreds to thousands of times faster) than mechanical hard disks and even SSDs for reading and writing data.

Because physical memory performs operations much, much faster than hard disk, RAM disk can greatly improve application performance. Given that large capacity memory is now widely available and mostly idle, so we can use software like GiliSoft RAMDisk to create free memory as virtual hard drives for use, thus increasing the running speed of software or system many times.

Computer users who have a little extra money or are willing to cost input on hardware probably have installed and are running their operating systems on a solid-state drive (SSD), in order to gain a better PC performance and user experience. However, SSD has a fatal drawback - it can not write frequently, otherwise the disk life can be significantly shortened. As a result, virtualizing the physical memory as RAM disk became popular. Without exaggeration, RAM disk can be twice as fast as the top-of-the-line SSD and 10 times of the fastest HDD at least!

By modifying the environment variables of system or software to save a variety of commonly used temporary folders (Temp, IE Cache, Download folder, for example) to the virtual hard disk (RAM drive), we can effectively improve the file reading/writing speed and software running speed. And in fact, it can also reduce the reading/writing times of physical disk so as to prolong its service life to some extent.