I’ve been messing around with slipstreaming and with ramdisks, but since I’m not completely certain the slipstream process works consistently, I’m not publishing it today. I’m very excited about the possibilities that ramdisks have, but I got the ramdisk to fail on me twice last night. In light of that, I’m not going to come out and say what a great thing this particular ramdisk product is when I have doubts about its ability to stand up to heavy use.
In my Amiga days, I did most of my everyday computing using a ramdisk as my main storage medium. The operating system used it heavily, and all my downloads went there. I did all my creation and extraction of Zip files there. I even had the machine configured to reboot off one. The initial cold boot had to come off a hard drive, but the machine was capable of warm booting from its ramdisk. I took advantage of that, and when I had to reboot, the machine was back in literally seconds. Booting Windows 7 from a ramdisk is a non-starter on several levels, but if a ramdisk can’t do everything else an SSD can do and do it faster, I don’t think it’s worth having.
So I have high standards and high expectations.
When I find something that works well, I’ll share it.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
