Installing and Using a RAM Disk

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Home , Installing the RAM Disk , Configuring the RAM Disk ; Using the RAM Disk

What is it and Why bother?

A Random Access memory (“RAM”) disk is a disk drive, like the disk drives on your computer, but it is made out of RAM memory instead of metal plates coared with oxides.

You save your work to your hard drive disk, because if you did not, your work would be lost from volatile RAM memory when your computer is powered off.

So if you store data in a RAM disk, you lose it all when you power off the computer.

Doesn’t sound so smart, does it?

But suppose you WANTED to lose that data each time you powered off the computer?

Why would you store data on something that is guaranteed to lose that data?

Well, you’d store the sort of data that you wanted to lose when you powered off the computer.

An example of that sort of data would be your browser cache. How often have you read or heard that “emptying your cache” might solve a problem? If your browser cache is on RAM disk, it is bound to be emptied whenever you reboot your computer. !00% guranteed!

In the good old days of 360KB 5.25” floppy disks and 640 KB machines we would make a RAM disk and copy program files to the RAM disk for aftsre loading throughout the day; those considerations no longer apply because Windows memory management does a better job than humans ever could about anticipating workloads on memory and requirements for data from a hard disk drive.

Browser cache alone is worth the small effort to set up a RAM disk. And as you read the newspaper after rebooting first thing in the morning, you just KNOW that the news will be fresh!

To learn more, search the web for “win7 free ram disk software” without the quotes, and skim the articles.

I decided to give Dataram’s product a try, and on the next few pages I have documented the steps I took to get it up and running.

I downlaoded the current version Dataram_RAMDisk_V3.5.130R17a from the web site at http://memory.dataram.com/ . For good measure I grabbed a copy of the Users’s Manual (Dataram_User_Manual_35) and skimmed through that, too.

Next Step: Installing the RAM Disk

Toronto and Mississauga, Wednesday, August 03, 2011 3:56 PM