now that is a handy thing to know.i wonder since your able to have the ram disk get created on boot is there a hack to move the whole os into ram?? did you guys ever get anywhere with that?? I think you would have to worry about data loss if the system crashed or hung up on you ,now if you could have the disk get accessed ever so often say every 5 minutes and dump the files and or changes to files to there respective places “doubtful” this might be a viable way to go I’m sure everything would feel snappier with no hard disk being needed to read and write files.

for those looking to load _an_ entire OS into RAM, the best solution would be to check out a linux distribution. knoppix, for example, has a ‘toram’ parameter that can be used to dump the entire OS into RAM and run from it.

as for mac os, however, you’d be looking into some uncharted territory since a lot of the mac os is closed source.

I thought that SSD’s were actually better for many, many small files.

The advantage comes from the fact that there is practically no seek time compared to hard drives.

However, once a hard drives finds a file, the actual reading of it is faster than an SSD.

Another free RAM disk program for Mac OS X is my own Make RAM Disk.

I also would be interested in doing this for windows. Running browsers off of USB sticks can be very slow, but if they were loaded into ram…….

_matt, i thought ram drive only need to be small, say 256mb or less. Usually you would store only cached file or page fault stuff. I’m not looking to store the entire OS in ram.

This “hack” has been extensively discussed on the linux kernel mailing list and kernel trap.

Just please, no one suggest putting a swap file in the ramdisk! :)

Most of the Mac user community moved away from the need for Ram Disks around the time MacOs 8.1 came out, even more so when we moved to OSX…….

Jaysus, that’s all so lame. Firefox stores data in RAM if the disk cache is set to 0. Of course, you lose cache data once it’s over, but in the meantime it works waaaay much snappier.

Putting the disk cache in RAM is just like trying to put the SWAP in RAM. Doesn’t it sound, erm, useless?

I’m sorry, wtf is wrong with you people? Putting the disk cache in a ramdisk? That’s beyond fail.
Go to about:config, set browser.cache.disk.enable to false. There. Firefox will use only RAM.
Oh and welcome to 2008 and the wonders of modern memory management.

Well, if you disable disk.cache doesn’t it ditch caching altogether? Then wouldn’t it surf slower anyway? OK it won’t use harddisk for retrieving cached data, but it will wait for downloading them, am I wrong?

I installed RAMDrive, set a 512MB drive, and pointed Firefox disk cache to a directory in it. Now I hardly restart my machine, it either goes to stand-by, or hibernation. In both cases, cached files are always in RAMDrive (~8MB now).

Firefox has a snappier feel now.

Plus, I created a pagefile in my RAMDrive, and disabled C: altogether. XP feels snappier, too.

But maybe I am just making up that progress, who knows.

I downloaded RAMDisk from here:
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/05/27/free-ramdisk-for-windows-vista-xp-2000-and-2003-server/

K.

article mentions no pricing yet, so who’s the supplier source for the ssd and what’s the price?

My brother used to boot Windows from RAM. I think he was using Windows 98 or 2000. I dont think it is possible for XP. Yes, I realize this article is about MAC but some commments have come up about Windows

Is nobody ever reading an article beyond the first two lines?

The SSD was only the reason to try a RAM disk. An SSD is a harddrive that uses RAM instead of a spinning disk. A RAM disk on the other hand is a software that simulates a harddisk using the RAM of your PC.

Even though they were both mentioned in a single article, they are something fundamentally different.

But apart form that, any kind of disk cahe is used if the RAM cahce is not suffifcient. If redirecting disk cache back into RAM makes a program faster, then the program is configured badly.

Wouldn’t setting the browser cache size to 0mb (to not cache to the drive) automatically save the cache to ram?

Puppy Linux runs completely in RAM if it can.

http://www.puppylinux.org/home

what’s with all of the flamers on here? geez. This may be old news to some people, but I see a lot of potential here.
Sure, you can set the disk cache to 0 in FF, but now I can have one centralized place (the ramdisk) for ALL my apps, so I don’t have to go to each program and their own memory use.

~/library/caches/firefox doesn’t exist on my system?

is there one for safari?

i notice some pages take a long time to even resolve they just sit at contacting.

i am thinking maybe safari or the underlying resources are making room in the cache to place the new files so if it could be done entirely in ram so the only time it ever gets written to disk is when ram gets full and spills over to the virtual memory.

tin hat got stuck in an endless loop booting trying to load my sata drive or something. then i shut it off and tried again without my sata drive connected and it got farther and rebooted itself.
hooray!

I remember running the entire OS on Mac OS 7 from a ram disk – simply create the ramdisk, copy The system folder accross (one drag and drop action), set the new ramdisk as the boot drive and reboot. Easy.

Ahh – back when an operating system was easily managed from within a single directory.

I’ve been doing this for years and years. My main reason for it was that I noticed that when I did a did repair, it was often the files in the browsercache that were broken. Also, it’s refreshing that a reboot would really get rid of browser poo. The only downside is that Camino (my preferred browser) loses it’s favicons in the fav’s bar. I can live with that.

I used to do this on my PCjr. I had 2megs of ram and used 720k of it to run a ram drive. Suddenly 4.77Mhz didn’t seem so slow…

I am barack obama and I approve this article

That is really cool.

WEEEEEE! RAM Harddrives http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hyperos-dram-hard-drive-block,1186.html

I realize capslock is disabled but at least it looks annoying and attention grabbing in my head.

update on the Firefox not opening issue. If you make the RamDisk invisible, add a . in front of the ram disk name. Example:

$ rm -r ~/library/caches/firefox

$mkdir /volumes/.ramdisk/firefox\ \(\cache\)

$ ln -s /volumes/.ramdisk/firefox\ \(\cache\) ~/library/caches/firefox

you can reach me through this id: torazio_torino@yahoo.co.uk

Ok, srsly.
All the fags talking about “copying OS to a ramdrive” are out of your mind retarted!

RAM drives are whipped clean every time you restart your computer.

If you moved all your OS8 files to a ramdisk, you’d have no OS.

You can’t ever EVER boot from a RAM disk. NEVER NEVER NEVER!

In theory, you could load all the system files to RAM at startup, then boot the system from that, but think about that for about ten seconds and you’ll realize why that’s a stupid redundant idea…

This made me think… here is an opportunity for OS innovation:
OSes should have some native support to go all out for performance.
For this topic, an OS would allow programs to create folders with a special type “cache folder” and a maximum size for it.
This would allow the OS to create a RAMdrive with enough size for all those caches.
Windows 7 is coming soon, it would be interesting to have such a thing…

Hold the boat man… all these people screaming “STUPID” and “LAME” aren’t even considering that any program you run… (pretty much ANY)… during the ENTIRE time that you’re running it, is going to run better if it’s on a ramdrive.

Now what is an OS? It’s a program.

Consider the Windows Vista can be sped up by providing a thumb drive for cache. That’s not a hack, but a FEATURE of the OS. Hmm, why and how?

Well… stuff is faster in RAM. Period. Naysayers, your arguments are uneducated and ill informed.

Cool Tip…totally made Firefox unuseable on my Mac! Tried re-installing Firefox but no joy. Guess I’ll just spend 200 days re-installing the entire SL install on my Mac. Excellent!

i did something like this a while ago on linux.
first i turned my /tmp folder into a tmpfs partition, so its a ramdisk that changes size as needed up to 1/2 your total ram(by default, you can make it more or less)
then i moved my firefox profile (~/mozilla/firefox/(random guid).default) to a permanent place, then copies it to the /tmp directory and deleted it, then symlinked from the /tmp to ~/mozilla/firefox/(its name) i also deleted cookies.sqlite and sessionstore.js and linked from their permanent location (so that changes to them would persist even if the computer suddenly took a nosedive.) then created a startup script to automate this process. this way everything firefox needs is in ram, it runs much nicer.
i also moved my ~/.Thumbnails to /tmp and linked to back to ~ this made thumbnails load faster AND it deleted them when my computer shut down(along with any incriminating evidence.)