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I havnt used a ram drive for years but at one time it was much faster than floppies or even hard drives. It is software (originally DOS) that sets up a virtual hard drive using ram. I used it for temp files and when shut down the files were lost. A ram drive could be used for a Daemon virtual drive and CD Clone could be used for lightning fast ripping. At one time with 4 GB of ram it would have been as big as my hard drive..

After XP or a few years ago I totally forgot about it but look at this link

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That link was from 2001. I think this idea is not worthy exploring. First of all, all of the modern 32 bit Operating system, like XP or even Vista, limits you to 4GB of total sytem memory, which is good but modern OS requires a lot of memory. If you take 1GB of that and make it to a RAM drive, then you are talking away 1GB from system resource, which would slow down lower level daemons, or even the kernel. Think about it, if you limit the system resources to 3GB, then it has to swap it's memory with the disk drive rather than keeping it in memory. Then it will slow down the overall system and whatever you may have gained from the RAMdrive is not that much.

Besides, if I remember right, the RAMdisk came up as another mounted volume, so you would still have to copy the files/programs/etc to the disk to use it. If you are ripping the CD+G to RAMdisk, you still have to transfer the files back to non volatile memory, like hard drive or FLASH drive, so you are still limited by your slowest transfer speed after you rip them. The waiting is the same whether you do it to the RAMdrive or hard drive, except now you have to do an extra step at the end. Not worth in my opinion.

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The ram drive comes from a period when DOS was then kernel and and mem was used in a very efficient manner The available ram might only be only be 64MB A ram drive in no way used 25% of ram. An Os could perform tasks that we use as hosts and no way required the computers needed now



There is no copying from a real drive to a ram drive The ram drive can be the default drive. It is very efficient to use CD Clone and copy an image to a hard drive. When used with a virtual drive the ripping process is 100 times faster. This was not presented as the final approach but as an alternative to be examined.

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You never hear about RAM drives any more for a good reason. They simply don't do any good, because any modern operating system uses any spare memory to buffer disk reads anyway. You essentially get the benefits of a RAM disk without the problems.

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[color=#ffff55]Mickey J.[/color]
Alas for those who never sing, but die with all their music in them.
-- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The CPU also has cache now which it didnt have before. The 8086 only had 2 registers of 16 bits. But it was a big improvement over the 286.

It Is Now safe To Turn Off Your Computer.... To me that was the biggest improvement Windows can now shut itself off.

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8086/8088 used in the XTs and then the 286 if I'm not mistaken. I loved those old things!

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