AMD Teams Up With Dataram To Give You 4GB RAMDisk For Free, 6GB If You Have Radeon Memory

When AMD launched its Radeon-branded memory last fall, it came as a bit of a surprise. In fact, in some ways it felt like AMD was trying anything in order to not keep all of its eggs in one basket, given the company's obvious struggles these past few years. Some thought that launch would be the end of it, that we'd never hear of AMD memory again - but we've been proven wrong this morning.

In a blog post entitled, Give your PC a boost with AMD Radeon RAMDisk, AMD offers us a free version of Dataram's RAMDisk software that will allow you to utilize up to 4GB of your memory for the cause, or up to 6GB if you happen to own AMD's branded sticks. Why would you want a RAMDisk? To speed up processes that constantly read and write to the disk. While SSD users might not see a major performance advantage, using a RAMDisk means that these read / writes hit your RAM, not your SSD, potentially prolonging its life.

AMD notes these perks when using a RAMDisk:

• Get gaming in as low as 4 secs or up to 1700% faster than an HDD
• Get significantly faster reading and writing speeds vs HDDs and SSDs
• RAMDisk read performance: Up to 25600 MB/s with DDR3-1600, and even higher with faster RAM!
• Protect your data with load and save features

Admittedly, it's going to be difficult to see advantages with the first bullet-point if you can only allocate 4GB or 6GB of RAM, and that's where the full-blown "AMD Radeon RAMDisk Xtreme" for $18.99 comes in. As mentioned above, this version allows you to use up to 64GB of memory. Generally speaking though, your RAMDisk shouldn't hog too high a percentage of your system memory if you want to actually use the rest for regular RAM purposes, so to help you with that math, AMD lays out suggestions on its purchase page.

I admit that while I've long considered using a RAMDisk day-to-day, I've only ever dabbled with it briefly. Do you use a RAMDisk? If so, would you consider it to be genuinely useful - perhaps even something you wouldn't want to go without?