The fastest ‘storage device’ you can buy — enthusiast uses AMD Ryzen’s 3D V-Cache to produce tiny, uber-fast pseudo SSD that could pave way to exciting prospects
Someone has managed to turn AMD's Ryzen 7 5800X3D processor into a storage device with read-write speeds that rival some of the best SSDs outside.
By running a RAM disk on the 3D V-Cache processor, our sister site Tom's hardware saw test results of around 178 GB/s for read and 163 GB/s for write when testing the system on CrystalDiskMark. It was performed by the GPUs are magical bill on X earlier this year.
The user had a system powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3d CPU and the speeds were all achieved within the 96MB L3 cache. They installed OSFMount and created a FAT32 formatted RAM drive. They ran the test software a few times and then achieved staggering speeds that exceeded that of the fastest SSDs.
The power of RAM disks
This is all made possible thanks to the concept of RAM drives, which are representations of hard drive storage using RAM units, which can behave like storage instead of memory with the help of some third-party software.
By implementing software like ImDisk you can turn some of your memory into something akin to a pseudo SSD that can increase storage performance up to 30 times. That's because RAM speeds are lightning fast compared to storage, but it's almost impossible to leverage memory as storage without the help of tools like this – and there will always be downsides, like the fact that everything is erased when you restart your PC start up.
In this case, the user configured the 96 MB L3 cache, which was part of the CPU, into something that could achieve incredible speeds. The fastest RAM units, on the other hand, achieve read and write speeds well under 150 GB/s.
That could be the fastest SSD tested so far Phison's PS5026-E26 Max14um Gen5 SSDwhich achieved read speeds of 142 GB/s and write speeds of 125 GB/s earlier this year.