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- can I get rid of it? Like, say, every time I run any program, I hear my HD running and files going off and on, and I don’t wanna wait for that. I want a PC that only uses its HD to store stuff when it’s turned off. Any running programs would be placed entirely into (lots of) RAM, say, 256 Megs as the “normal” RAM, and another gig or two functioning as another “disk drive”, get it? When the PC starts a program, first it copies the whole program into the RAM “drive”, and then runs it from there, saving everything when it’s all done. This seems an obvious way to build a real fast desktop computer, but I have not heard of it being used… - MC
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Computers can only address a limited amount of memory. I think it’s 4GB for Windows and x86 processors - that’s not much room for your software and data. Even if it’s enough, you need to copy the contents of a hard drive onto the RAM disk every time you turn on the computer.
And even then, what if you have a power outage? Everything you did since the last time you turned on the HD will be lost.
There are non-volatile memories available, like the flash memory used on digital cameras. Some even come with standard SCSI or IDE interfaces. But they are very expensive, and usually much slower than hard drives. I’ve seen them advertised, but I think they are only meant for harsh environments where hard drives may not survive.
What’s the speed of your hard drive? The things are getting considerably faster as the years go by and generally they tend to slap really slow and crappy models in PCs at the factory. If you’ve got a particularly slow model HD, then buying a faster one and installing it should improve things considerably. Its not a perfect solution, but it might ease your pain.
Used to do it all the time, on a much smaller scale years ago. The Mac Plus actually had more RAM than it had storage space, significantly so if you upgraded to the 4 MB configuration, so it made sense to put Roger Bates’ RAMDisk on an 800K floppy inside a System 6 System Folder and configure it to create a 1.5 MB virtual hard drive, spit out the disk, and allow you to use the now-empty floppy drive to save your documents as you create them. In an era when you could launch several programs plus run the operating system in less than 2 MB of RAM, and external SCSI hard drives were an expensive luxury, it was the way to go
That kind of thing sort of fell by the wayside during a long stretch of years during which storage media got cheaper and cheaper while RAM stayed expensive as all get out. It wasn’t that long ago that hard drives of several hundred megs were getting ever so affordable while 4 MB SIMMS still ate you up at $90 per meg. I knew several people whose RAM cost more than the rest of the computer combined.
There are still programs that will create RAM disks for you, including bootable ones, but even with RAM prices plummeting it will be awhile before you can buy and install enough RAM to run a multi-gig hard drive with enough left over to run a dozen programs.
Most people still go the other direction: they run a swap file (aka virtual memory) to free up some RAM.
[hijack] Is there REALLY a 4 gig limit for x86 processors? How about for PowerPC chips, do we have the same limit? Heck, that would just about be what I’d want for my STARTING memory configuration if I were buying a brand new top-of-the-line box these days, so it would be rather nice to have some room to expand into as time went on [/hijack]
Under computer properties, set your computer to ‘network server’ MC, it’s a little bit faster.
Um, that IS what your computer does. When you boot your computer, it copies the files it needs to boot into RAM. When you say “run MS Word” it copies the MS Word files into RAM and accesses them from there. When you’re done using Word, it removes the files from memory and loads up the files for whatever you want to do next.
If you’re getting a lot of disk drive activity, you may just need to buy more RAM. If you don’t have enough RAM to load all the needed files into memory, the OS is going to use the hard drive to swap out segments of data that it would rather store in RAM. Also, check to see if your hard drive is fragmented, or you may have an old hard drive that’s really slow.