ramBunctious X - 2.0.1

It seems really silly to pay somebody to do this when you can just use OSX's built-in functionality. Create a plain-text file with the following commands in it:

#!/bin/sh
NUMSECTORS=524288
# 64mb = 131072
# 128mb = 262144
# 256mb = 524288
# 512mb = 1048576
# 1gb = 2097152
mydev=`hdid -nomount ram://$NUMSECTORS`
newfs_hfs $mydev
mkdir /tmp/ramdrive
mount -t hfs $mydev /tmp/ramdrive

Save the file with a name like 'mkramdisk.sh', and give it executable permissions:

chmod 755 mkramdisk.sh

Run it. Voila. This script is right out of the man page for hdid. You can also read about doing this at

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_fs.html

K

I've used rambunctious fo r years on several versions of OSX. I think the app is Great.

However, I haven't gotten it to work on Panther, OSX.3. It does make a "misterious" disk that shows up in Disk Utility, but it doesn't show up in the Finder. The only way I know of getting rid of it is to reboot.

am very happy that these guys found Mac OS X's hidden, undocumented RAM disk feature, since it is very useful to certain things I do, so 5 stars.

on whether to use RAM disks or not, check out the following link. http://www.clarkwoodsoftware.com/rambunctious/RDOSX.html It's the program author's own article on using RAM disks on OS X. Don't worry, it's not some shameless plug like, "using my software will make everything run faster!" By the way, I used ramBunctious 1.6.2 satisfactorily when I was running OS 8.6. (In fact, I liked it enough to pay for it) So even though I haven't used this version yet, I can say that the author is a competent programmer, capable of writing quality apps.

a modern virtual memory system, ram disks can go one of two ways. They can 'wire down' a hunk of memory and dedicate it to being a ram disk-- this takes physical memory away from the OS. Advantage: true ram disk, never goes to disk. Disadvantage: less physical memory to be used by other apps, complete waste when ram disk is not active and the system is low on physical memory. The alternative is to allocate the ram disk as a hunk of virtual memory. That is, parts of the ram disk will be paged out to the VM files as the system needs memory. Disadvantage: not a true ram disk-- will occasionally stutter as parts of the ram disk are paged in from VM. Advantage: reading/writing pages of memory is generally a lot faster than reading/writing lots of small files. VM subsystem will also automatically page out parts of the ram disk that have been inactive for longer than others. There is no indication as to which approach this app takes. In any case, I'm not going to bother with it-- OS X's mach kernel has an extremely well optimized VM and caching subsystem that has been tuned and is continuing to be tuned by Apple. I'm not going to second guess it.