Back in ye olde days of DOS Microsoft included a utility with the system called RAMDRIVE.SYS.  This utility allowed you to carve off a few kilobytes of your system’s precious RAM to use as a pseudo hard drive that was highly effective for reading and writing large volumes of data to and from a drive at high speeds.

The speed comes from the fact that a computer can write to memory much faster than it can write to hard disks (or god forbid, external media and network drives).  RAM has always been built for performance because it needs to do so much interaction directly with the CPU therefore memory architectures have evolved to allow huge amounts of data to be pushed through ever-wider pipes between the CPU and memory.

So you want a RAM Disk do ya?

The first thing you need to do is obtain drivers to make this magic work.  There are several options available for this, the one I chose to use installs itself most like an actual driver.  In some other cases the setup is more like an application which must be executed to make the RAM disk work.  The drivers I’ve closen for this I downloaded from ramdisk.tk.  The company offers a free version (up to 64MB) and a paid version which has a maximum capacity much higher.

Once you’ve downloaded the drivers, and unzipped them follow the installation procedure for new hardware.  I’ve included a slideshow of the screenshots, or you ca use the step-by-step directions below.

Slideshow

[tylr-slidr width="510" height="450" userID="36477201@N00" groupID=""]http://www.flickr.com/photos/kmsquared/sets/72157615707500410/[/tylr-slidr]

Installation

1. In Control Panel, open the Add New Hardware wizard
2. Click Next
3. Select Yes, I have already connected the hardware, click Next
4. Select Add new hardware device from the bottom of the list, click Next
5. Select Install the hardware that I manually select from a list, click Next
6. Select Show all devices, click Next
7. Click Have Disk, browse to the folder in which you unzipped the drivers, select RAMDisk.inf and click Open, click OK, click Next
8. Click Next
9. Click Next
10. Click Finish

Once installed, you can access the RAM disk properties through the device manager.  This will allow you to set the size, and drive letter for your RAM disk.

Uses for your RAM disk

1. Storage of temporary files (photoshop, temp folders etc).  Don’t put your swap file here… you’re better off just to use the physical RAM.
2. Storage of files which high rates of I/O – programming projects that need compilation will build faster on a RAM disk
3. Files which shouldn’t be stored permanently for privacy reasons – web browser files, for example.

Notes of caution

1. The RAM disk takes away available physical memory, so select the smallest drive you can make use of.
2. Anything you save to you RAM disk will be LOST once the computer is powered down. If you save data to that drive you’ll need to remember to copy it before shutdown.

So go forth and set up your super-fast disk!  If you come up with a great new use for your RAM drive, or find a driver you like more, stick it in the comments!

photo credit: brutal on flickr.