Ramdrive.sys

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How do I set up a RAMDRIVE in WindowsXP? I'm familiar with the setup in
Windows 98 but is there a different XP requirement for setting up a ramdrive?

I tried using my familiar command from W98 in CONFIG.NT in XP but the
ramdrive didn't set up.
 
Ramdrive.sys does not exist on XP.

The way I understand it, ramdrive.sys didn't even work in Windows ME.

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Hope this helps. Let us know.

Wes
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User

In
 
Clay said:
How do I set up a RAMDRIVE in WindowsXP? I'm familiar with the setup
in Windows 98 but is there a different XP requirement for setting up
a ramdrive?

I tried using my familiar command from W98 in CONFIG.NT in XP but the
ramdrive didn't set up.
Click to expand...


There is third-party software available to do this, but let me ask you what
your purpose is in doing this. Except for an unusual special situation,
using a RAM drive in Wiondows is counterproductive. Most people who try to
do this do so because of a misunderstanding of how memory management works.
 
Tue, 7 Mar 2006 08:27:07 -0800 from Clay
How do I set up a RAMDRIVE in WindowsXP? I'm familiar with the setup in
Windows 98 but is there a different XP requirement for setting up a ramdrive?
Click to expand...

The first question is not How but Why.

Think long and hard about this. In DOS and early Windows versions,
the rationale for a RAM drive was that there was RAM going unused.
But Win XP (and other recent versions) make use of much more memory,
if it's available. Therefore there's little or no unused memory. So
if you set up a RAM drive, essentially you're making Windows handle
memory in a less efficient manner, and you may even hurt the overall
performance.

The only possible justification I can see for a RAM drive nowadays is
to have temporary files that get deleted automatically at shutdown.
You can accomplish the same thing by dedicating a directory and then
adding a
del %MYSPECIALDIRECTORY%
command to the shutdown script.
 
I don't know anything about the OP's needs, but a few years back, I had a
machine with 1GB RAM (more than I needed at the time; typically usage peaked
at maybe 700MB), and so I set aside 128MB as a ramdrive and compiled Visual
Studio 6 projects onto that. I didn't care about keeping the SBRs/OBJs
generated, and generating those files in memory as opposed to the hard drive
was tremendously faster.

While I agree with most respondants' reaction that there is definitely a
point where taking memory *away* from the system cache to allocate to a
ramdrive is counterproductive, there are definitely instances where having a
small ramdrive is beneficial. You just have to tweak the amount allocated
until data doesn't start getting paged to disk because available memory has
been reduced...
 
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