What's a ram drive and how do I make one?

[theplanb]

Umm..
Nothing more to add..

 

[CTweak]

A program to create these used to ship with older versions of DOS. Basically it was a way to assign a portion of RAM to be used as if it were a disk drive. So you could copy files over to it then run programs from the RAM drive and they would operate very quickly, since RAM is so much faster than a hard drive.

There are still ramdrive utilitys out there (shareware stuff), but the need for them is not very high due to modern OS's memeory management as well as the extreme bloat of programs nowdays.

 

[Tripleshot]

Go to bootdisk.com and download a bootdisk that has ram drive on it.

 

[theplanb]

umm.. then can I have my OS working on the ram drive?

 

[CTweak]

Yes, in theory you could have an AUTOEXEC.BAT that loaded the ramdrive, then copied the OS to the new ram drive (which would be seen as, for example, drive D:, or whatever the next available drive letter is).

In practice I don't know how useful this would be, since the speed you gain from this would more than likely be offset by the long copy time at boot up. You can still only copy file to the ram drive as fast as the HD can read.

Also, I'm not sure what the size limits on those ram drive are, seems the built in DOS ram drive program was very low limit (like 8 megs or something!) The shareware programs would probably be higher.

 

[SammyBoy]

ummm, i dont think ur gonna want 500megs of data on ur ramdrive. Its not like ur comp needs to read the whole OS to boot, and you would have to copy it over fully for it to work. plus ud need a lot of ram. forget about it, theres no real good reason to make one