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ARTICLES |
| Setting Up a RAMdisk July 3, 2008 |
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Considering the limitations of the relatively small storage
space of the Solid State Drives (SSD) on the Eee, their meager writing
performance, and issue of wear of your drive, minimizing the writing to
your SSD can be advantageous for improved speed, limited SSD wear, and
offer better security. One way to do this is by utilizing a RAMdisk. A RAMdisk
essentially sets up a portion of your RAM to act as a virtual hard drive. Considering Windows XP prefers 512MB minimum RAM to run most applications, I recommend having minimum 1GB of RAM in your Eee (which is standard in the 900 and 901), but *HIGHLY* recommend 2GB to get the most benefit. Not only that, with 2GB RAM, you can disable your Windows pagefile without worry. Using Gavotte RAMdisk is free and easy. Follow these steps to get set up: (1) Visit
this site and download the file. Link is about half way down (recommend
alternative link). Your RAMdisk should now show up as fixed drive as letter 'R:' (or whatever letter you decided to use), and include a folder called "Temp". You should be able to read and write files to it just like any other conventional storage drive. Just remember that anything that is stored on it is deleted when you shut down or reboot your PC. Your RAMdisk will always be there until you run the 'ramdisk.exe' program again and disable it. Windows Temporary Files So what can we do with this RAMdisk now? Primarily act as temporary
storage. Several processes or programs in windows make frequent writes to
your hard drive. Two of these can be managed through the RAMdisk. These are your
Windows temp(orary) files and internet browser cache files. Whenever a
program is installed on your hard drive or applications need a temporary
location to store files, it defaults to your Windows temp folders. These are
located in two locations: You can revise these locations by: Now any Windows temporary files will be written to your RAMdisk. This
should reduce wear to your SSD, and improve performance a bit in certain
instances. Keep in mind that sometimes a program will require a lot more
file space to perform its operations. Some games like to dump as much as 1
GB or more to a temporary file during installation. If this is the case,
then set up your TEMP folder to either your C: drive, your alternative SSD
drive (8GB or 16GB in your Eee 900 or 901), or to a removeable SD card. But
for most operations, the size in your RAMdisk should be adequate. Internet Cache For your internet cache, I will recommend the procedure for both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3. Since the RAMdisk is purged after each reboot, since it is using your volatile RAM, this improves security, erasing your internet cache every time you shoot down or reboot. Internet Explorer: You should now have your Internet Explorer temporary files in your RAMdisk. Keep in mind that all these files are purged when you restart your PC. Cookies are somehow kept. Firefox: If you look in your R:\Temp directory you should see Firefox temporary
files there. Other Uses You can use your RAMdisk to store files temporarily during your same Windows session. For example, a temporary location to extract zip files and run a setup program. |