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RAM FS doesn't see that the drive letter is already used by VMware Shared Folder - Fixed

8 weeks ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Thank you for the clear steps and the screenshot - it reproduced here exactly. With shared folders switched off in VM, the mapping stays remembered. Windows Explorer still shows it, and it reclaims the letter as soon as sharing is switched back on, but no device answers on that letter, so the usual Windows checks reported the letter as free and allowed RAM FS to offer it. In the latest buil

'Display Speed in Taskbar' re-enables itself on process start - Fixed

8 weeks ago, by Andrew in NetWorx Forum

Thanks for the detailed report. This looks like a bug, not anything you did. NetWorx still carries a one-time migration from the old taskbar deskband to the current widget. At startup it asks the shell whether the legacy deskband is still showing; if so, it hides it and switches the widget on, saving that to the database. That save is the problem - it can overwrite your own setting on every lau

Re: Guide for switching between RAM Disk and RAM File System

8 weeks ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Thanks for the follow-ups. The memory bar We'd rather leave this one as it is, and the reason is the very thing you'd lose. The volume's usage is drawn as its own segment precisely so it can be told apart from everything else the system is using. If the two were grouped, you would see, say, 12 GB used with no way to know how much of that is the volume and how much is the rest of Windows - a

Re: How to disable activity log

8 weeks ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Below are the answers to all your questions: The activity statistics No switch to turn them off yet, but they're smaller than the name suggests: four numbers, being bytes read, bytes written, peak read speed and peak write speed. No filenames, no timestamps, no record of what you did. They're counted in memory and the four totals are saved to the driver's own registry key so the "since

Feature Request: Dismount without saving to image - Implemented

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Thank you for the suggestion! This is now implemented in the latest development build, in a slightly different form that is more optimised as is doesn't require the remount step. Simply install the new build over your current version and reboot to activate the updated driver. Instead of a separate "dismount without saving", there is a single Reload from Image command. After a confirma

RAM FS indexing with Voidtools "Everything" - Solution

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Hi René, Thank you for the kind words, much appreciated. RAM File System reports itself as NTFS to Windows so that other applications treat it normally; but internally it is our own file system, not NTFS. It means there is no MFT and no USN journal inside it, and those are exactly what Everything reads when it indexes an NTFS volume at speed. So that particular route is not available. The

Re: Guide for switching between RAM Disk and RAM File System

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

The behaviour is all intentional, below is the explanation. What "Launch automatically at startup" does: This option is only about the console. It determines whether the GUI starts with Windows and sits in the tray. The volumes are created by the driver, which starts early in the boot process, so they come up either way. That is why your disks were still there after a reboot. Th

Re: RFS image file grows too large

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

The 6.96 GB is the file's nominal length, not the space it actually occupies. RFS images are sparse files, and the empty areas inside them take up nothing on disk. Please check this first: right-click the .rfs file, choose Properties, and compare Size with Size on disk. Your "Size on disk" should be close to the 2 GB you actually store. If so, nothing is wrong - the volume is not cons

Re: Guide for switching between RAM Disk and RAM File System

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Good point, and a fair one to add to the guide. You can keep the old letter — the two products store their auto-mount settings in the registry, one key per volume, and the drive letter is the name of that key. So it is just a rename, and it takes effect after a reboot. For example, RAM Disk is on R:, and you have set up a RAM File System volume identically on S:. Close both consoles first, then

Re: The nosec option in ramfsctl

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Yes, it's not compatible with the source folder / mirror feature, that requires full set of permissions when mirroring files from an NTFS folder.

Re: Guide for switching between RAM Disk and RAM File System

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

The move between RAM Disk and RAM FS is pretty much just pointing things at a new volume letter. Can RAM File System use a RAM Disk image? No, and not the other way round either. The two formats have nothing in common: A RAM Disk .img is a copy of a virtual disk, with NTFS, exFAT or FAT32 formatted inside it. RAM Disk gives Windows a disk, and Windows' own file system does the rest. A RAM F

Re: RAM FS hangs when manually mounting a disk

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

First of all, our apologies - we know this has already taken a good deal of your time. We would not do so if we had been able to identify the fault. We took your report very seriously and build a test machine around it. Since your system runs security software that ours do not, we installed four different products in turn and repeated your exact sequence with each. Between them they cover every

Re: RAM File System hangs when manually mounting a disk

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Thank you - that narrows things down a great deal. At this point the fastest way for us to fix this is to see the failure ourselves. We have been unable to reproduce it on any of our machines, and your filter list shows why: your system runs three third-party file system filters (CrowdStrike Falcon, what appears to be Flexera software-management, and one we cannot identify), while ours run none

Re: Read/write speeds in RAM Disk vs RAM FS

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Awesome, thank you for confirming this! Interestingly, it only happens occasionally. Later on we'll investigate why Defender does this and hopefully find a better workaround.

Re: RAM FS hangs when manually mounting a disk

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Thank you for the report - the detail that RAM Disk 26.7 is fine on the same machine was particularly useful. We could not reproduce it here: on a VMware virtual machine running Windows 10, a 512 MB volume left idle for several minutes and then unmounted and remounted completed in well under a tenth of a second every time, empty or populated. So something on your machine appears to be involved,

Re: Read/write speeds in RAM Disk vs RAM FS

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Yes, please see the above - we've encountered the exact same thing in T4 and T8 tests and it turned out to be a serialisation lock in WdFilter (Windows Defender).

Re: Read/write speeds in RAM Disk vs RAM FS

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Thank you for the detailed report, and especially for the side-by-side screenshot - that made the cause identifiable straight away. What you're seeing is almost certainly Windows Defender's file system filter, not a limitation of RAM FS. We ran into exactly the same thing during development: on a volume that isn't in Defender's exclusion list, the filter can take an exclusive lock on every writ

Re: RAM FS Feature Request: Save contents before system sleep

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

It's on our list for RAM File System, but not for this release - we're currently focused on the macOS and Linux versions, so it would come at a later stage. There's a technical side to it too: Windows gives a driver very little notice before it suspends, and no way to ask it to wait, so a volume of any decent size can't reliably be written in that window. We'd rather do it properly than releasing

Re: Feature request: change an existing volume's drive letter in RAM FS

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Thank you for the suggestion. We have just implemented it, and it will be included in the next RAM FS release next week. You will be able to change the drive letter directly in the properties of an existing volume, just like in RAM Disk. The next release will also include a number of other fixes and a new folder synchronisation feature. This will work similarly to an image-backed persistent dri

Re: RFS image file grows too large

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Yes, the excessive image size has been fixed in the upcoming version. Small files are now packed together instead of each occupying a separate 2 MB block. This keeps the image much closer to the amount of data actually stored. The old image is a sparse file, but some backup programs expand its empty areas while copying it. This explains why the backup becomes a real 34 GB file and takes so long

Re: RFS image file grows too large

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

That was one of the edge cases we unfortunately missed in the initial releases. When there are a large number of very small files, a RAM FS image could become unnecessarily large because each file, no matter how small, occupied a 2 MB block in the image. We have already discovered and fixed that issue, and a new version will be available in a few days. It will also include a new feature that le

Re: Enabling RAM FS compression doesn't seem to compress anything

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Great idea! We've just added the Comparison with NTFS page. It covers what is similar between them, what RAM FS does better, and what is not implemented. It also explains how free space is counted, as that does seem to cause some confusion: RAM FS doesn't store zeros, so the space reported as used is typically less (often much less) than the total size of the files on the volume.

Re: RAM FS suggestion: Automatically copy files to the volume

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

The batch+delay solution is indeed good in that it is simple and readily available. But as it only works one way, we'll look into a two-way folder sync - that will be the best solution. 😉

Re: RAM FS feedback: Symbolic Links work well

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Great to hear! Thanks for testing and letting us know! 👍

Re: RAM FS suggestion: Automatically copy files to the volume

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

That's something we may consider for a future release if there's enough demand. It would need to work both ways to be truly useful: files copied from the source folder at mount, and changed files copied back at dismount or shutdown. One-way copying is the easy half, but it also means anything you create or edit on the RAM volume is lost on reboot, which is rarely what people want. Worth noti

Re: Read/write speeds in RAM Disk vs RAM FS

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Thanks for sharing your results! In our testing we've found there's quite a bit of variation between runs and even between reboots, especially in the 1 MB tests that are limited by memory bandwidth. Those tend to fluctuate depending on the overall system load and whatever else is running in the background at the same time. There are also a few areas where RAM FS is noticeably faster for

Re: RAM FS image files are much larger than RAM volumes

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Thanks for the report. You haven't missed anything in the setup. What you're almost certainly seeing is the logical size of the .rfs file rather than the space it actually occupies. Could you please confirm one thing: right-click each .rfs file, then open its Properties, and tell us both values: the "Size" and the "Size on disk"? If "Size on disk" is no larger t

Re: Files on RAM FS cannot be opened via double-click

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

Thanks for reporting this. We have implemented the setting of a label in the latest version (26.8).

Executables on RAM FS drive cannot be opened - Fixed

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

This issue affected only executables that require administrator privileges and a UAC prompt. It has been fixed in RAM File System v26.8. Please download the latest version. After installing the update, reboot your PC to ensure the new driver is loaded. Thanks for reporting such issues and helping us improve the product.

Re: Files on RAM FS cannot be opened via double-click

2 months ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum

That's odd. In that case, it may be one of the installed shell extensions or a similar component causing the issue. Could you please post a complete list of what's installed on your PC? To do that, run the attached BAT file. It will generate a text file on your desktop. You can then either attach the file here (preferably zipped) or send it to us via a support ticket. We'll have a look and s