Free RamDisk software for XP.

[ironk]

Came across this:

http://omega.idv.tw/download/show.php?id=76

Its in chinese, but the program is in English. I tried it out, and it does work as advertised. I was a little wary since its in chinese, but it seems to work well. I really hope its legit and doesn't mess peoples computers.

Uploaded it on Mediafire too:

http://www.mediafire.com/?105tz2gggbk

The gui is very simple to use as well.

The thread with a pic:

http://omega.idv.tw/kdb120/viewthread.php?threadid=2936

 

[TanisHalfElven]

that a nice idea. but who has ram to spare to make a hdd ?

 

[blckgrffn]

Originally posted by: tanishalfelven
that a nice idea. but who has ram to spare to make a hdd ?

64bit windows users with workstations?

no idea...

Nat

 

[tealk]

I agree....I dunno why I would want to gain an extra 2gb worth of space in my RAM.....seems like a high risk for little gain.....I dunno....Just my thought.

 

[ironk]

Maybe to protect yourself from pr0n?:

Text

Comment number 2:

"And that is what a ramdisk is for. To help protect yourself, simply set your browsers temporary internet files directory to your ramdisk. That way the junk is never on your hard drives,and goes away the second you kill the power. I switched to this years ago after viewing some of the files in my temp internet directory and found pictures of things that never crossed my screen. Or if they did,it was done in a tenth of a second and written over before I could ever see it. I was rather shocked to see what was hidden without my knowledge on my drive. This works well with IE, however some of the other browsers do not seem to give you the option of where they store what."

 

[hans007]

isnt being able to set up a ramdisk built in to windows?

 

[xirtam]

Originally posted by: hans007
isnt being able to set up a ramdisk built in to windows?

I'd hope so. I could do it with DOS 2.1.

 

[smarttart62]

http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=131

Aparently the use for a ram drive is because: computers can read and write from RAM much faster than it can read from the hard drive

 

[hytek369]

been looking for this for awhile. thanks OP

 

[edavid]

Windows already caches file contents in RAM. Unless you know exactly what you are doing, you will hurt performance by using this.

 

[dehemke]

There used to be a big use this sort of thing - pre hard drives; but now?

Ram disks were vital parts of my hard drive less Atari ST and Amiga boots, but I haven't had the need for one since.

 

[hans007]

Originally posted by: edavid
Windows already caches file contents in RAM. Unless you know exactly what you are doing, you will hurt performance by using this.

well with a ram disk, you are asure that windows wont swap it out of the swap file.

but you could just go to your path and set ramdrive= whatever. so why use some random chinese software that could be a backdoor or virus.

 

[YouTube]

yay! i been looking for it

:thumbsup:

 

[TerryMathews]

Considering that 32 bit systems are (excluding PAE) limited to 3.5GB of RAM under Windows and given the advent of 'add your own RAM' disk drives (for DDR and DDR2), I can't see a benefit to this.

 

[niji1875]

no idea.

 

[tallman45]

In theory this would help Photoshop if used as a Sctartch Disk, could help out greatly

 

[blckgrffn]

Read anandtechs review of the Gigabyte SATA ram drive, and you can see this helps less than you might expect.

 

[ClockerXP]

I think XP already does something like that already but not fully. I have 2GB RAM and run Firefox all day. Hard drive spins up to load firefox but then spins down about an hour later. I can close and relaunch firefox all day long and the program just stays in ram and my HDDs don't need to spin up. Only time they spin up is when I'm reading/writing something new to them.

I think this program is like the Superfetch built into Vista. Interesting program since it allows you to specify what you want in the ramdisk.

 

[FPSguy]

Ramdisk Guide (how to set up a free ramdisk in XP)

 

[edavid]

Originally posted by: tallman45
In theory this would help Photoshop if used as a Sctartch Disk, could help out greatly

No, it will hurt. In the Photoshop preferences, you can set the amount of RAM used by Photoshop. It won't access the scratch disks until it has consumed that much RAM. So, instead of dedicating RAM to a RAMdisk, just set your Photoshop preferences.

 

[Kur]

There was a computer company (closed down now) that had something like this. It was a ram based hard drive and windows would boot almost instantly. The hard drives were maybe 10GB max if I remember right.

 

[FPSguy]

Originally posted by: Kur
There was a computer company (closed down now) that had something like this. It was a ram based hard drive and windows would boot almost instantly. The hard drives were maybe 10GB max if I remember right.

If you are talking about the Gigabyte i-RAM, the company is still in business, the drive is really hard to find though, and the maximum storage is 4GB (8GB if you RAID two of them).

 

[Bobartig]

Ram disks were all the rage back in the days of the Macintosh II. If you had the dough to buy 16 or 32 mb's of ram, you could set up a ram disk with the whole OS in it and get some hefty performance increases. Of course, they only lasted until you had to write something to disk.

With modern OS's maintaining hundreds of megabytes of page files, I don't see how this would help performance. WinXP and Mac OS X are already using ram and disk space to efficiently cache commonly used resources. Even with a RAM disk, WinXP is still going to page things out when it sees fit. I'd happily accept being wrong though, if someone can point to some benchmarks with this stuff making everything go faster.

 

[Miramonti]

I use superspeed.com and have for years, because the program backs up and reloads the contents on shutdown/reboot.

I keep my browsers in it as well as some other apps where max speed is very important. I think my ramdisk is 2gb, with 3gb total on my winXp system.

 

[Kur]

Originally posted by: FPSguy

Originally posted by: Kur
There was a computer company (closed down now) that had something like this. It was a ram based hard drive and windows would boot almost instantly. The hard drives were maybe 10GB max if I remember right.

If you are talking about the Gigabyte i-RAM, the company is still in business, the drive is really hard to find though, and the maximum storage is 4GB (8GB if you RAID two of them).

Nope, it was a company that went out of business a few years ago, they used to make really high-end PC's like alienware with unique inventions. Ive been trying to think of the company but can't recall them.