Compression: If you need to compress a large number of files as part of your workflow, moving them to a RAM disk can speed up the compression time.

Video or audio editing/rendering: Load textures, images, audio loops, or other media assets you’ll be using onto a RAM disk for better overall performance.

You should see faster load times and rendering speeds, and smoother play.

Games: Try loading your favorite game, or for small RAM disks, just the saved game files to a RAM disk.

This assumes the app in question prefers to use disk space for its temporary files.

Scratch space and temp files: Assigning RAM disk space for use with a multimedia app as scratch space can increase the app’s performance.

If you can live with the downside of RAM disks, primarily their small sizes, and the issue of not being able to retain data when power to your Mac is turned off, then there are still plenty of good uses for them. RAM disks are likely to be the fastest storage location available on a Mac, easily outperforming any hard drive, and in most cases, beating out SSDs. You had to remember to copy the content of the RAM disk to your main storage system or your work would be lost. The only disadvantage to RAM disks was that the data stored in them was lost every time you turned your Mac off, or the power went out. In my case, over 10x faster than my Mac’s startup drive.) RAM disks, on the other hand, were very fast, and could easily meet the needs of real-time editing with their ability to write or read files as quickly as the RAM could be accessed, without the mechanical latency inherent in SCSI or floppy disks. SCSI drives could meet the needs of image editing and page layout, but audio editing was at best iffy, with most SCSI drives being too slow to provide the needed bandwidth for audio or other real-time editing. Floppy drives weren’t fast enough for professionals or avid amateurs to work with new rich media editing systems, such as audio editors, image editors, or page layout apps. The second common use of a RAM disk back in the Mac Plus days was to create a tiered storage system.

The performance increase was amazing, and was achieved for just the cost of a RAM disk utility app. The first prominent use of a RAM disk was to copy the Mac’s slow ROM (Read Only Memory), which contained many of the system’s core components, along with the operating system, which was stored on a floppy drive, and move them both to a RAM disk where they could operate at the speed of RAM many, many times faster than either the floppy disk or the ROM. If you really had cash to burn, you could hook up a 20MB SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) hard drive, which would likely set you back well over $1,200.

Remember, back then, most Mac Plus users were getting by with a single 800 KB floppy drive, while those who felt like splurging could add an additional external floppy drive. Other users discovered that a RAM disk could be used to create an amazingly fast storage system. And while many users were happy to just max out the RAM, and enjoy the performance gain of having more memory, which let them run more applications concurrently, some users discovered the joys of using a RAM disk to speed up the system and apps. That was an amazing amount of RAM in 1986, and begged the question: What can I do with all this memory space?Īt the same time, many users were asking how they could speed up their Macs. The Mac Plus shipped with 1 MB of RAM, but users could increase the memory size to 4 MB. The Mac Plus, released in 1986, had quite a few new features, including the use of SIM (Single Inline Memory) modules that users could easily upgrade. RAM disks existed before the Macintosh ever hit the market, but we’re going to predominantly explore how RAM disks were used with the Mac. The system, as well as any installed apps, can write files to or read files from the RAM disk, just as if it really were another storage drive mounted on your Mac.īut unlike any storage drive, a RAM disk can operate at the speed of RAM, which is usually many times faster than most drive storage systems. Once a popular option in the early days of the Mac, RAM disks, which were used to speed up the performance of a Mac, have fallen by the wayside.Ĭonceptually, RAM disks are a simple idea: a chunk of RAM set aside that looks, to the Mac system, like just another storage drive.

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