practical uses for RamDisk

[ThePiston]

Anyone use RamDisk? I'm trying to find a practical use for it besides Internet Cache.

 

[bendixG15]

The ship has sailed on RamDisk

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: ThePiston
I'm trying to find a practical use for it besides Internet Cache.

:crickets;

Windows already manages memory and disk caching very well so products like this are a waste of time for most people.

 

[Cerb]

For handling moderately sized chunks of data in which there is a lot of random access. Say, if you have a 200MB database that is killing your poor HDD.

As well, note than modern OSes (Windows 2000 and up, OS X, most Linux distros) will cache parts of the filesystem in RAM, and try to intelligently manage how much is loaded, to give good speed. They don't do this perfectly, because there are many 'gotcha' scenarios to avoid, but they do a pretty good job. So, overall, no, there aren't any novel uses for a RAM disk on a desktop.

 

[SnoMunke]

Dude,

RamDisks are the wave of the future...oh, wait a minute...this isn't 1997? 😀

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, Are you talking about RamDisk, a external drive using Ram instead of a real Hard Drive or Ramdisk using computer memory and pretending to be a real disk? Jim

 

[piasabird]

WIN98 Boot Disk used Ramdisk. You could look at it and see how it works. They put stuff in cabs on the floppy and then unpacked it into the ramdisk. It is kind of like loading files off of a disk like a floppy or a CDROM into memory and then access would be faster. Use to use commands like LOAD HIGH MSDOS and put MSDOS in memory.

I could see a use for this for loading a virtual CDROM into RAM if you had a lot of RAM like 2 gigs. If you were playing a game, it could make file access faster.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: piasabird
I could see a use for this for loading a virtual CDROM into RAM if you had a lot of RAM like 2 gigs. If you were playing a game, it could make file access faster.

The thing is that the OS will basically do this anyway if you have a lot of RAM. The filesystem cache will get quite big, and frequently-accessed disk blocks will more or less stay there.

It's primarily useful for loading a whole bunch of data into RAM at once (in advance of when you'll actually be accessing it) and ensuring that it doesn't fall out. This is not generally all that useful unless you have some specific app (like a database) that you want to be in RAM all the time, since you're taking away RAM from the general OS cache.