The RAM disk on Ryzen’s 3D V-Cache reaches insane speeds

Fast SSDs in all their glory – The fastest forms of storage have always been Random Access Memory (RAM) disks. In recent years, the areas of use have not been very numerous, among other things, their use in servers that do not have permanent storage space but load the operating system from a memory card or similar directly to a RAM disk and then reside entirely in working memory.

The fact that it is not very common does not prevent users from experimenting with the technology, and this applies not only to random access memory (RAM) disks in the computer’s regular working memory, but nowadays also to the cache memory built into the processor. Tom’s devices Calculation reports enemy Back in February, X shared instructions for putting a RAM disk on the Ryzen 7 5800X3D’s 3D V‑Cache, with amazing results. On Crystaldiskmark, it offers read and write speeds of 183 and 175 GB/s, respectively. This is about 15 times faster than SSDs equipped with PCI-Express 5.0. Similar results were also achieved with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, among other devices.

The technician uses Osfmount to create a RAM disk with very specific settings to enable Crystaldiskmark to run and achieve high speeds. The file system is FAT32 and Crystaldiskmark must be set to play the SEQ256K Q1T16 with zeros instead of random data.

Tom’s Hardware points out that this type of RAM disk is not useful in practice, but it is an interesting experiment that explores the theoretical possibilities of 3D V‑Cache. However, if AMD comes up with a more reliable method, it could be more useful, especially on EPYC and Threadripper processors which have a much larger fast cache.