[Tenacious Dyl]

Hey everyone,
A few of my buddies and I were talking about using RAM as a hard-drive, and how wouldn't it be great if OS X could just run off your RAM, and it wasn't erased at shut-down, and blah blah blah. So we got to talking about RAM Cache applications, and what (if any) practical application they had to anything... and I came up with something novel. Don't blame me if anyone else has come up with this, I did, independantly, make the same discovery.

If you have any mac with os x and a decent amount of ram you can do this...

What I did was use "Esperance DV 2.3" (http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16518)
to create a 500 MB ram disk (I have 2.5 GBS of ram so no problem)

Next, under system prefs / esperance, I set it to auto-backup the ram disk, and auto load the old backup upon log-in.

Next, I went under all my filesharing / downloading applications, and selected the ramdisk as the download source, and other applications,the ram disk as the scratch disk.

Next, under my downloading apps (I use mostly xfactor) I selected the "delete file after download, import to itunes, blah blah" option.

The result? Hundreds (sometimes more) of downloads, from wherever, are downloaded, in their little pieces, at remarkable speed to my ram. Once they are complete, the full file is added to my actual hard-drive, and the ram is cleared of the old file. This causes a VERY significant decrease in lag when downloading files, and also saves my harddrives a LOT of wear and tear.

Give this set-up a shot, let me know what you think, has anyone else used ram-disks to much success?

[alphamatrix]

Back in the day I ran Seti@Home on a RAM disk in OS 9 (iMac).

But all that stuff you said, very cool.

[mduell]

I have a very hard time believing your internet connection is so fast that your hard drive couldn't easily keep up with it.

[andreas_g4]

Dude, when you download that much stuff that fast, you should consider a fast RAID solution… And a good lawyer