Tip of the Week: RAM Disk

Back in the day, I had a 14” Wallstreet PowerBook and pimped it out with 192MB of RAM. Under the classic Mac OS, it was easy to create a RAM disk, and there were plenty of reasons to do so. I was taking a Photoshop class when I bought the computer, and wanted to get as much performance as possible, so I decided to use a RAM disk for scratch space. This greatly improved the performance of Photoshop, as reading and writing to RAM is many orders of magnitude faster than reading or writing to a hard disk, thereby allowing huge amounts of data to be fed to the processor in short order.

The other way I used the RAM disk was to drag my entire system folder and a copy of ClarisWorks into a RAM disk. This way, I could use the RAM disk as the startup disk and run the only program I needed from it, preventing the actual hard drive from ever spinning up. Battery life was astronomical.

Gone are the days where the entire Mac OS can fit onto any 100MB storage device. There are plenty of other ways to conserve battery life–and batteries themselves have come a long way. However, the Photoshop scratch-in-RAM trick holds true.

Fire up the Terminal and issue this command:

hdid -nomount ram://8388608

Almost instantly, you’ll have an unformatted 4GB RAM disk. If you have more or less RAM installed, simply multiply 8388608 by the factor you wish to increase or reduce the size of the RAM disk. Fire up Disk Utility and format it, and it’ll then appear on your desktop. With this done, use Photoshop’s preferences to specify this disk as your first scratch disk. This should greatly increase the program’s performance!

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