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Running from a RAMdisk?


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Okay, so I'm heavily intoxicated here. Please pardon if I'm making an ass of myself. But I was thinking, I have 8 GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro, 6 GB in my Mac Pro, and 32 GB in my Xserve. I very, very rarely use anywhere near all that. In fact, I very, very rarely deal with much more than all that every day. Is there any way to have a RAMdisk, so my first boot copies everything from a hard drive partition to a RAM disk and shutdown dumps it to an image or something? I'm just thinking, solid state disks are really fast, RAM is faster, SSD's are expensive, and I already have RAM. Is there any way to do something like this? Maybe using a hypervisor?

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  • 4 months later...

I don't know about mounting the ENTIRE file system to shared ram (ramdisk) without doing this in chameleon or another bootloader.

 

However, you might be able to create /dev/shm, then copy an entire volume to /dev/shm then a symbolic link (or something similar) from that volume to the new 'volume'.. this would allow 100% of the hard drive read/writes to go to ram, but the problem with this is 1) you need way more than 8GB of ram. I think the min volume size for an osx disk is like 12gigs or something crazy. and 2) All writes to /dev/shm will not be written to the real volume causing data loss. Even if coding a script that writes to the hdd when changes are made as a sort of 'backup', still dataloss would be apparent when there is a power outage, and it only complicates system updates 100x more than it should too.

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