Ram Disk - what, how, why

I've noticed quite a few mentions of Ramdisk in other threads on here but very little about it. Probably the old timers think everyone knows about the feature and the new folks don't know enough about it to ask.

I happened to mention on another section that you could create a small, temporary, lightning-fast hard drive in memory on Win95/98 systems and had two emails asking me how.

A brief explanation for those who aren't familiar with the things - you simply force the PC to set aside a section of memory and treat it as if it were another hard drive on your PC. The main differences are that it is temporary and goes away when you reboot and that it is many, many times faster than any physical drive could be. For example, years ago (Win95) I set up a system for a hospital registration and medical records section that would allow access to patient information when the main database (big Unix critter) was down. Generated a huge text file that could be searched. Problem was, the search for a specific name would take nearly 20 minutes so wasn't practical. Made a modification to load a ramdisk at startup and to copy the file to it. Search time was reduced from 20 minutes to around 10 seconds.

To get you started on this fairly simple setup, take a look Here.

Since I'm a long way from using any 9x system, any questions can be much better fielded by some of the 9x gurus on here.

 

I have been using a Ram disk for years but a third party app.

It was written by John Lajoie but he sold the rights to Cenatek a couple of years back.

"RAMDisk can be configured to automatically load a disk image at startup and save the image to disk at shutdown. This allows the RAMDisk to function almost exactly like a hard disk; no data is lost when the power is turned off. "

The above is why I got it. At one time I was running all the major browsers and all their respective caches were on the Ram disk. My TEMP folder is also there. My code compilers use TEMP quite a lot so compilation is blindingly fast. I also download app installs there too. Self extractors use the TEMP folder so installs are almost instantaneous.

I have 384MB with a 64Mb Ram disk. Cenatek's advice on vcache is rubbish for Win98. They are still stuck in Win95 mode. MaxFileCache needs to be reduced to accomodate the Ram disk - that's all - not throttle the manager with a ludicrously low limit. They also mention using it for 'swap space'. If they mean swap file then that is also rubbish and John Lajoie himself argued against that.

I've had RamDisk9xMe on board since June '91 without problem.

However, it was much cheaper then - it will knock you back $49 today.

RamDisk

 

I have never found a situation where this would be useful -
home PC here. It works OK and most of the stuff you can pull off a 98se bootdisk.
With today's cheap memory and hard drives, what does it give you for advantages ?
regards

 

Don't think I'd find a runway in my back garden useful what with me not having an aircraft and all.

 

ge ...
encryted ?
do not follow
regards

 

Runway

Oh, I dunno.... could go go-kart racing.

 

Aha, someone who uses the same decrypting algorithm.