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Ramdisks are helpful because they are super-fast. I tested a ramdisk in one of my computers and compared its speed in writing files and reading them back. One of my floppy drives took 1,098 seconds, one of my hard drives took 89 seconds and the ramdisk took only 3.7 seconds.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Faster than a hard disk? It's a ramdisk


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 1990, The Syracuse Newspapers

   Floppy disks are slow, and hard disks are fast. But what's even faster than a hard disk?
   A ramdisk, that's what. All computers, even little Commodores and Ataris, can have ramdisks, although they are much more common on standard PCs and the three "other" systems -- Macs, Amigas and STs.
   IBM calls its ramdisk a "virtual disk," and a few other companies refer to theirs as "ramdrives." But whatever the name, every ramdisk works the same way: A portion of the computer's random-access memory (RAM) is set aside and made to work like a disk drive. This distinction is ignored by the operating system (MS-DOS, for example); as far as it's concerned, the ramdisk is just one more drive in the system.
   There are only two disadvantages to a ramdisk -- it disappears when the computer is shut off (or when the power suddenly goes out), and it takes memory space away from other uses.
   The second drawback is a minor one, and might not even be a problem at all if the ramdisk uses extra memory outside the normal range of the operating system. (That's how ramdisks using extended or expanded memory work with regular PCs, and it's how the relatively huge 576k ramdisk works in one of my 64k computers.)
   But the first disadvantage limits the usefulness of ramdisks. You'd never want to store anything valuable in a ramdisk -- unless, of course, you already have another copy of it somewhere else. However, you won't have any problems if you treat all the files on a ramdisk as temporary files.
   What could these temporary files be? They could be dictionary and thesaurus files for your word processor, or they could be graphic images; they could be scripts for your telecomm program. (By the way, that's precisely what is kept on a large ramdisk in the PC we use here at the paragraph factory to run the Syracuse Newspapers Telesystem.)
   Ramdisks are usually easy to create. MS-DOS and PC-DOS users can set up a ramdisk using VDISK.SYS or RAMDRIVE.SYS or a similar program (check your DOS master disks). Mac, Amiga and ST ramdisks are simple, too.
   Ramdisks are helpful because they are super-fast. I tested a ramdisk in one of my computers and compared its speed in writing files and reading them back. In one of the tests, which reads many sections of the disk, one of my floppy drives took 1,098 seconds, and another floppy drive took 1,039 seconds. One of my hard drives took 89 seconds -- a vast speed improvement over the floppies -- but the ramdisk took only 3.7 seconds.
   That makes the ramdisk 12 times faster than the hard disk and 304 times faster then the floppy.