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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.
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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. Built-in disk image manipulation tools.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.Volatile RAM disks whose contents disappears on shutdown.Persistent RAM disks with associated on-disk images.Any RAM disk size on 64-bit systems, up to approximately 3.5 GB on 32-bit systems.In practice, up to 26 disks due to the number of drive letters available. The key features of SoftPerfect RAM Disk: You can also work with on-disk images and RAM disks associated with on-disk files to preserve your data between sessions. This product lets you create any number of virtual RAM disks limited only by the memory available. Modern computers are equipped with at least 4 GB of RAM, and most of the time there is a lot of unused memory that could be used as a high-performance alternative to the slower hard disk storage. As Windows and third-party applications often create a large number of temporary files for a short time only, using a RAM disk will extend your hard disk’s life by sparing it from excessive reading and writing. Furthermore, Windows can be configured to use the disk for temp files, so the system and most other applications would store their temporary data on the fast in-memory disk. The program creates a virtual disk residing in the computer RAM accessible in Windows Explorer and other applications, allowing you to store any temporary information on this disk. As the memory is much faster than physical hard disks, storing temporary data on a fast in-memory disk achieves a higher performance. SoftPerfect RAM Disk is a high-performance RAM disk application that lets you have a disk on your computer entirely stored in the memory.
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