SoftPerfect Support Forum
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Re: Feature Request: Dismount without saving
yesterday, 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 saves you the remount step as well. Instead of a separate "dismount without saving", there is a single Reload from Image command. After a confirmation that tells you when the image was last saved, it dismounts the volume without writing anything back and immediately
Re: RFS problems with everything from voidtools
yesterday, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum
Hi René, and thank you for the kind words, much appreciated You have not hit a bug, and it is not really a fundamental problem either. RAM File System reports itself as NTFS so that applications treat it normally, but internally it is our own file system, not NTFS. That means there is no MFT and no USN journal inside it, and those are exactly what Everything reads when it indexes an NTFS volum
Re: Is there a guide for switching between RAM File System and RAM Disk
yesterday, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum
Good questions, and the behaviour is all intentional, so let me explain it. What "Launch automatically at startup" does: This option is only about the console. It decides whether the GUI starts with Windows and sits in the tray. Your 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
Re: RFS image file grows too large
yesterday, 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 cost nothing on disk. Please check this first: right-click the .rfs file, choose Properties, and compare Size with Size on disk. I expect "Size on disk" to be close to the 2 GB you actually store. If so, nothing is wrong - the volume is not consumi
Re: Is there a guide for switching between RAM File System and RAM Disk
2 days 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. Say RAM Disk is on R:, and you have set up a RAM File System volume identically on S:. Close both consoles first, then open Reg
2 days 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 mirroing files from an NTFS folder.
Re: Is there a guide for switching between RAM File System and RAM Disk
3 days ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum
Thanks — that's a fair request, and the answer is short, because the move is mostly "point things at a new 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 fil
Re: RAM File System hangs when manually mounting a disk
3 days ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum
First of all, our apologies - I know this has already taken a good deal of your time, and we are asking for a little more. We would not do so if we had been able to find the fault ourselves. We took your report seriously enough to 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 sequen
Re: RAM File System hangs when manually mounting a disk
3 days 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
3 days 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 File System hangs when manually mounting a disk
3 days 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
3 days 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
3 days 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 File System Feature Request: "Save contents before system sleep"
3 days 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 real size can't reliably be written in that window. We'd rather do it properly than ship somethi
Re: Upgrade for RAM Disk users
5 days ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum
We did send a free licence key to everyone who purchased RAM Disk in the last few months, so perhaps the email ended up in your spam folder. But that's okay, I have attached the original email along with your licence key to the support ticked you submitted. I hope you enjoy our new RAM File System app 🐏
Re: Feature request: change an existing volume's drive letter in RAM FS
6 days 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
9 days 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
9 days 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
9 days 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
10 days 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
10 days 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
10 days 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
10 days 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
10 days 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
12 days 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
12 days 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
15 days 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
Re: RAM FS volume properties show different used space compared to folder properties
16 days ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum
Thanks for the compliments about the performance - great to hear it's working well for you. That difference in the reported used space is normal, and nothing is wrong with your volume or your data. Both figures are correct, they simply measure different things. Shader cache files are created at their full size up front and filled in gradually. In other words, the files are mostly consisting
Re: Can RAM Disk and RAM File System be used simultaneously?
16 days ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum
There is generally no need to run both RAM Disk and RAM FS, as they provide the same kind of service: ultra-fast storage in memory (although RAM FS is the faster of the two). It is just an option for those users who do need both those apps. In most cases, you can simply choose one or the other, as outlined in our guide: RAM Disk vs RAM File System: which should you choose? The main reason to
Re: Files on RAM FS cannot be opened via double-click
17 days ago, by Andrew in RAM Disk & RAM File System Forum
Sorry that's not something we can download or test. However, we've just published a new build with several fixes that might help - please install it over, reboot, and let us know if it resolves your issue. In the new build, RAM FS volumes identify themselves as NTFS instead of RAMFS. This is because some third-party tools don't understand non-standard filesystems and refuse to work with them, o