RAM Disks

[g_shocker182]

I was looking around and read about these things...sound pretty neat but I was wondering if anybody here had heard of/ looked into/ has one. Apparently the great part about them is that they are numerously faster than harddrives and require less power.

TechTV Link:
http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/howto/story/0,24330,3509083,00.html

[The village idiot]

Software that makes part of your system memory act like a disk. It has it's uses! You might also look into Solid State Disks. They are non-volitile, but expensive!!!

[g_shocker182]

Yeah these things are packed with about 4Gb of RAM on a PCI card.

[Solarjetman]

Other than bragging rights, I never really saw the fasination with RAM disks. I personally don't care if it takes 10 seconds longer to load my program. Once its loaded into memory, the RAM disk means squat. The only advantage I would like is the ability to copy my large DV files faster. But since its volitile memory, that is not an ability a RAM disk can provide me.

Just my two cents worth

[sterno]

I used to use a RAM disk a lot, back when 5.25" floppies were the standard. At that time some companies even sold power supplies with battery backups for their RAM expansion cards to use them as non-volatile storage.

Some of the older Macs supported RAM disks that would survive a reboot (but not a power cycle) and you could actually configure the system to boot from it. In the mid-90s I experimented with putting the base OS on a RAM disk and running from that, it booted and ran very quickly but I just didn't have enough memory left to run applications well. Memory was expensive back then. These days you could still get a worthwhile boost by running your OS off a RAM disk, but now most systems need a gigabyte of storage just to install the OS.

Today I mainly use a RAM disk for temp space and things like browser cache files. I don't need to keep those, and the Mac restores the contents of the RAM disk when you boot. I only use RAM disks in Mac and UNIX systems, they include RAM disk support in the base OS so I don't have to buy any add-ons.

[mrtristan]

I've been experimenting with a free version of some software that I found online, but I can't get the partition larger than 64MB. That's pretty much only big enough to store web browsing cache. I didn't ever find another use for it.