Best file system for ImDisk?
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Hi everyone,
I'm a long-time ImDisk user, both at home and at work, but I've always wondered what was the best file system to use on a Win64 PC when I want to place all Temp directories in the RAM disk, along with Firefox's disk cache.
I've looked it up online, and it seems that FAT is supposed to be faster than FAT 32, which in turn is supposedly faster than exFAT, which is rumored to be faster than NTFS. However, Windows 11 seems to favor NTFS when it comes to speedy read and write onto a RAM disk, so which is it?
(And sorry if this has already been debated: I looked at the first pages of this forum before posting, and learned a ton of things, but didn't find the answer to my question.)
Last edit: Danish Bronco 2023-02-12
The truth may be not so obvious...
Of course, file creation and removal should be slower on NTFS, but most of the time, operations are just reading or writing data in a file. And for that, older file systems are not necessarily faster.
Why not benchmark them?
https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskmark/
Be careful to have the same parameters, especially the cluster size.
Feel free to publish your results.
Hi and thanks for replying so fast!
I've read an article where those file systems were compared with relation to a removable device, and NTFS was the "slowest", but by a small margin. I haven't had the time to benchmark the different file systems on a RAM disk yet, but I'll try and post the results here.
Bon dimanche !
OK, I did just that, with Power management set on High Performance on an Asus VivoBook (10th Gen Core i3 - 8 GB of DDR4 RAM @ 2667MHz); I had to set the FAT disk at 4095 MB because that's the limit, apparently.
Top row, left to right: FAT 32 - FAT
Bottom row, left to right: NTFS - exFAT
(couldn't insert the image directly in this reply, sorry)
Edit: fixed
Last edit: v77 2023-02-12
Thanks! As I thought, no big difference...
On a very old hardware, it could be something to consider, but nowadays...
Thanks for fixing the image insert, and yeah, nothing to write home about, clearly. I've settled for a 6 GB FAT32 RAM disk because Firefox seems a bit faster that way, but could just be my imagination... :-)