[Appleman]

I have been searching in the forums for this, but only found threads dating back to 2000, 2002. Since Tiger is this possible? Mac Help doesn't say anything about it, so I;m afraid not.
CharlesS seemed to have made an app which has something to do with it though it isn't clear to me if that is what I want: with RAM Disk I mean the thing we had in OS 9.
Thanks.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

Here is a ram disk creator for OS X that was working in Panther... I'd email them and see if it still works...

http://www.donelleschi.com/ramdiskcreator/

[CharlesS]

Figure out the size you want, in kilobytes. Multiply that number by 2 to get the number of 512-byte sectors. Now, enter this command:

hdiutil attach -nomount ram://<sectors>

replacing <sectors> with the number of 512-byte sectors in the RAM disk that you want. This will create a RAM disk. You'll still need to format it with Disk Utility, newfs, or whatever.

Of course, there are a few GUI wrappers to do this, too, if you don't like the Terminal.

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by Tyler McAdams

Here is a ram disk creator for OS X that was working in Panther... I'd email them and see if it still works...

http://www.donelleschi.com/ramdiskcreator/

Thanks.

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Figure out the size you want, in kilobytes. Multiply that number by 2 to get the number of 512-byte sectors. Now, enter this command:

hdiutil attach -nomount ram://<sectors>

replacing <sectors> with the number of 512-byte sectors in the RAM disk that you want. This will create a RAM disk. You'll still need to format it with Disk Utility, newfs, or whatever.

Of course, there are a few GUI wrappers to do this, too, if you don't like the Terminal.

Thanks.

[larkost]

Much more important note: 99 out of 100 times a RAM disk will not make things any faster, and will probably make this slower when you count in the time to create and manage the RAM-disk. MacOS X already intelligently caches disk operations so you are only duplicating the work it is already doing, and just cutting down on the memory available for it to do its work.

The number of cases where you can better guess what ram usage pattern is better than the OS is very small.

[Tyre MacAdmin]

You could make a ram disk for a VPC vm which would help things if you have a G5 with about 4gigs worth of ram... that's an example that would seep things up. I think it comes down to do you have the extra ram to allocate, so that the system and the program(s) you're using at the time don't become affected.

[Appleman]

Originally Posted by larkost

Much more important note: 99 out of 100 times a RAM disk will not make things any faster, and will probably make this slower when you count in the time to create and manage the RAM-disk. MacOS X already intelligently caches disk operations so you are only duplicating the work it is already doing, and just cutting down on the memory available for it to do its work.

The number of cases where you can better guess what ram usage pattern is better than the OS is very small.

In that case I'll stay away from it.