Virtual Hard Drive

thomas01155

Is there any other software like this but free or is it a waste of time using something like this.

http://www.farstone.com/software/virtual-hard-drive.htm


Thanks Thomas

albertross_2

If you use system ram for a ram drive, it will steal the ram from elsewhere, main working memory, cache etc, so largely pointless, and could slow things down if you have limited memory.

If you have 4GB then using 1GB for temp files might have some advantages, it keeps your HD clean of crap for one (you would have to hack the registry a bit, to get all the temp pointers other than TEMP pointing to x: or whatever).

http://www.freeramdisk.com/

http://www.ramdisk.tk/

bat999

It's weird isn't it.
I thought that applications were loaded into RAM when they were used anyway.
What bit am I missing?

crox

The programs take up too much space, so the OS uses a swap file to store parts of the app it doesn't currently need so that it can work more efficently.

thomas01155

thanks for the help probably wont use it then. ( i fought it was the other way round like virtual memory so hard drive to ram.):p

bat999

crox wrote: »

The programs take up too much space, so the OS uses a swap file to store parts of the app it doesn't currently need so that it can work more efficently.

Yes, I know about swap files.
But what exactly is this software supposed to be doing that we don't do already?

ManAtHome

More about data/files tha programs isn't it? If you bung a database in RAM, you can read it a lot faster. Also useful for any temporary files so I can see it being useful for (eg) compilers, but not for calculation intensive apps as mentioned on the website.

albertross_2

Some applications write to disk as they are going along, using temporary files, many never clean up after themselves when they close, IE for example (although there is a setting to clean up temp files on closure nowadays).

So in that scenario, even with cacheing speeding things up, the PC will still have to write that data to the hard disk at somepoint. So if it was writing to RAM instead, then the whole process would be faster, and less disk intensive, and the temp files would vanish on boot.

So if you have sufficient RAM to run any applications, plenty to spare, and disk intensive applications, a RAM drive can be beneficial.

crox

bat999 wrote: »

Yes, I know about swap files.
But what exactly is this software supposed to be doing that we don't do already?

My apologies, I see I read your question the wrong way round.