If you can’t tell from the latest series of posts, I’ve been working very closely with the file system, especially exceptional circumstances when certain conditions go wrong. I’ve found it really interesting to see how to automate some of the test scenarios since I’ve never done anything like this before. One of the things I’ve been looking at closely are RamDisk utilities for windows, especially for things I can manipulate programmatically.
Most of the utilities on the net seem really robust, with the most favoured being the freeware RamDisk that comes from MyDigitalLife. There are also plenty of other commercial alternatives. The freeware RamDisk has a simple user interface that makes it really easy to manually mount a drive though their instructions for command line execution must less user-friendly, with few examples available, and what help document there is very unintuitive. Even obvious attempts with class command line options (slashes, dashes, double dashes, colon-separate name-value pairs) failed and I ran out of patience.
Unfortunately most other RamDisk tools for windows are all GUI-based and, in general, cost some money to use.
Did you actually find if ramdisks did improve the performance, or were you just after a cheap disposable file system…
My impression a few years back was, that a ramdisk is actually not that much faster as a hard drive, when it comes to small amounts of data.
I wasn’t doing any tests about whether or not it increased performance, as I was looking more for the latter.