Ram Drive

i have win xp home edition installed. i installed a ram drive because i have 768
meg ram for my internet cache and windows temp files. my questions is it
safe to have a ram drive? where can i find more information about ram drives
on the internet.the nice thing about a ram drive is if you reboot your pc all
data is lost.

 

jonathan,

Certainly. RAM drives have been around for years, and were (can be) used to speed up programs, among other things. However, now-a-days there's not much point to bothering because computers have pretty much overcome the speed problems of the old 386/486's. I can't think of any reason to have a RAMdisk except when booting from a win9x startup floppy.

 

jonathan - I think you have just named a way to use a ram drive that can cause you problems on occasion.

If you are doing a new software install and have to reboot to complete it, there is a decent chance the software will use things it has place in Temp to complete the install and then (if it is well written) delete the temp files.

With the way you are using the Ramdisk, the software would not find things it needed after the reboot and the install might fail or complete with errors.

If you like to play with them I'd suggest things like temporary internet files be stored there but not much else. The things certainly are faster than a physical drive can ever be and are sorta fun to mess with.