Ok, so I am bored as hell at work this week, and have no internet. I was sent to the "offsite" and just sit in a room with nothing but a bunch of drugs around me, and an old computer barely running winbloze and a few games to help keep us sane.

So I was thinking...

Could I build a box, strap in say, 4-8GB of RAM and use that as my hard drive? Would this eliminate the bottleneck that the hard drive is creating in systems? I know as soon as it shutdown, it'd all be lost, but if I put Linux on it, then I wouldn't have to worry about that very often right? Or I could have like a 500MB drive, to keep the "image" on, and then transfer this image to the RAM after boot. Is this possible?

Not, how would I do this, but just is it possible. If you do know how, that'd be great too, but just a "sure chad, if you are that much of a weenie, you could do it" or a "You lunatic, of course you can't, where'd you say you're from?" would be cool.

Cool

Yeah, of course you could do it, in theory. You heard of that HyperdriveOS (really sad name) thing? It's advertised as allowing you to copy your OS (Windows... what else?) into RAM at boot-time to speed up both booting and running... one drawback is that you still need to drop back to harddisk mode to install stuff... and it costs a fortune! I reckon that since you can (easily...ish) make small 'Ramdrives' (small partitions that are, in actual fact, part of your RAM), that you could probably create a whole OS sized RAM-partition. One Q though... if your system were to have, say, 8Gb of RAM, how much would you set aside for virtual filesysteming and how much would you set aside for memory? Don't forget that even programs that run from memory need memory to run in... if that makes any sense.

Yeah, I really didn't take that into play. I would guess an easy stick of 512 should suffice for something like that, but then that'd probably become the bottleneck?

Do you think anyone has successfully done this? That'd be cool to see some stats and things from it.

Cool

It's done all the time... but on a much, much smaller scale. If you take a look at how many bootdisks work, they open up a small amount of memory and format it as... tmpfs, I think... and then run from there.

Sweet! I will have to check that out, not that I have 8GB of RAM lying around, but hey, it sure sounds cool.

Thanks