RAMDRIVEs

[FelixDeCat]

Ramdisks are great if you have a need for them. I have a specific task that is extremely disk dependent(but not used often enough to justify the cost and time to optimize) and needs to read and write very small files rapidly. I'm sure there is a more efficient way to accomplish what I need, but what I did was allocate 12-13 GB of ram to ramdisk, and create a virtualbox disk on the ram drive. I then installed XP to it, so the XP 'boot' drive is all ram(but the guest OS doesn't know that).

Once I am done with one project I just copy the VMDK file to a normal drive, and then when I need to do another(which could be weeks or months later), I start the ramdisk software again and then copy the VMDK file over to it.

It seems to work well because some applications do not work properly if not installed to c, but with the virtual machine my entire c drive is ram. If using normal hard drives it would take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to finish one task, with the ram disk it's done in a couple hours generally.

edit - just wanted to add what software I use. I use the paid for version of dataram ramdisk since i require disks larger than the 4gb limit. I'm pretty sure it was only around $10 when I bought it but it looks like it's up to $18 now.. still pretty cheap if you have something that needs very fast disk access.

Good info. Believe it or not, I havent used a ramdrive since I last used DOS as on OS!

I also run a few virtual machines on occasion using VMware player including a virtual private network over TOR or Ubuntu. The purpose of dual booting XP was so I could play some old games that only run SP2 or Windows98. The software emulated graphics are insufficient for this purpose as they include high frame rates and use a lot of dedicated video memory. They do not render in a virtual machine.

Ive always been a fan of XP and used it faithfully until July 2011 when I finally upgraded from a P4 system to a 2500k. The new system was 14x faster and the extra memory was a breath of fresh air.

I may have to try your idea of running a .vdmk from ram however. It sounds like fun.