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ramBunctious 1.5 ($25 Shareware) Although hard drives and memory are both getting faster, RAM still has the edge in speed. With RAM prices at around $1 MB, combined with the ability to have over 1 GB of RAM in the latest Mac, you may want to set aside a few megabytes for a RAM disk. A RAM disk offers much better read and write speeds than the mechanical counterpart. A basic RAM disk has been available in the Mac OS since System 7, but you may want more features than Apple offers. When you start ramBunctious for the first time, you'll probably want to create a RAM disk. After selecting New RAM Disk... from the File menu, you'll see why ramBunctious is different. The default is to create a RAM-only volume, just like the Apple RAM disk, but you can uncheck this option to get the added benefit of being able to save the RAM disk image to a disk file.
Creating a RAM Disk Once the disk is created, you'll be presented with a Status Window, if you selected this option during creation. This window will let you fine-tune the disk's attributes, especially for a disk-based volume. You can choose the write-through option, which will affect performance, but makes sure that the disk image is always up-to-date, handy in the case of a crash. There are other options which will save less frequently, trading performance versus how recent you want the disk data to be.
ramBunctious Configuration Options Another nifty feature, not available in some other packages, is the ability to mount multiple RAM disks. This could be useful if RAM is tight, and you want to segment your data among multiple RAM disks. One last benefit of ramBunctious is that when a RAM disk is unmounted, the RAM is immediately reclaimed. The only downside is that ramBunctious can't be used as a startup disk. Do something with that extra RAM and speed up your system with ramBunctious. Have any other Mac OS Gadgets you'd like us to look at? Let John know via e-mail, or share it with the rest of us in the Mac Gadget Forum. Useful Link |
