MS-DOS and Windows on a RamDrive

[@fluffycritter]

Back in 1994 I worked at a local computer shop that did custom builds, and we got a high roller who ordered a computer with a whopping 16MB of RAM, the most that was possible and a ridiculous amount for the time. So just for fun, the person building the computer decided to set up a 12MB RAM drive and installed Windows onto it, and we were all blown away at just how quickly everything ran, and wondered why the heck the person even needed more than 4MB for anyway.

[@georgerogers1166]

Running nt would make more sense.

[@garytallowin6623]

In 1994 I had both a pc and a mac with 64MB+ of ram the mac was a 7100 and it had 136MB total (8mb soldered and 4x32MB's) The pc was thrown together sh*t but it still had 64MB If you used photoshop (was version 3 I think) or other creation tools back then then having this much ram was more common than you think.

[@Vile-Flesh]

I remember in late 1994, father coming home with 4MB of RAM to add to our Pionex 486sx25. We had been struggling with 4MB of RAM for months with DOOM2 and it would only run with a batch file that had to be executed before most of the usual TSRs and level 16 Suburbs and level 30 Icon of Sin would sometimes hard freeze. I could definitely feel the performance difference in that budget family 486 going from 4MB to 8MB and DOOM2 no longer froze on any level after that. To this day I am still surprised he got us the extra RAM because he was very thrifty and we had economy everything and we were dreading saving up birthday money and Christmas money to get the God damned RAM. We suffered with that 486sx until 1997 when we FINALLY got a Pentium 133 (cue the chorus of angels singing). I guess things could have been worse and we could have been one of the poor bastards stuck with a 386.

[@garytallowin6623]

@@Vile-Flesh Ouch at playing doom on a 486 :D Think I was on a P90 in 1994 but I cant be 100% sure.

[@PSjustanormalguy]

Me and a buddy back in 1993 knew a guy who would tell everyone he had 16MB RAM, so he became "16 megabyte man" for the rest of his time at Uni 😂

[@JamieBainbridge]

I used to work with a guy who sent his PC to the shop to upgrade 4Mb RAM to 8Mb. The shop made a mistake and ADDED 8Mb. He had people coming over to his house to see this computer boot with a gigantic mythical 12Mb RAM!

[@bitsundbolts]

Haha, cool. The things you could have been proud to own at that time! I am sure it was amazing

[@GreenAppelPie]

I used Ramdrive on my PC junior that didn’t have a hard drive as a B: Drive for games that required using two disks. It was really convenient as it also only had one floppy drive. I had no idea it could been used for extended memory as well.

[@alexloktionoff6833]

My first 386SX33 didn't have HDD at all, why if FD is 1.44MB and even 1MB RAM leaved >300KB of XMS for RAMDRIVE with DOS + NC.

[@sandmanxo]

I always wondered when I was 16 what this would be like but only had 4mb of ram in 1993-1995 timeframe. Glad to finally see it.

[@vk3fbab]

I had a legacy application at work that made too much use of the filesystem and we were running it over the network. It was so much faster to create a ram disk and copy it from the network to the ram drive, do all of the work and copy it back. We even started using 7zip to improve network copy speeds and have a backup. This was on windows 10. Our RAM drive was a GB from memory.

[@jamesrdgrs]

What an awesome video! I remember doing this stuff back in the early 90's with my first PC, just to learn how it worked.

[@bitsundbolts]

I wish I knew about it back then. It would have been fun to experiment with RAM drives.

[@tomlouie2855]

I did this too back in the day. Spent like an entire weekend getting it to work, to save several minutes each time Windows restarted. I doubt i saved any time when you add it all up, but it sure was fun.

[@hayleyxyz]

I did a lot of messing around with ram drives in my teens. And of course I think this is still very common in the Linux world (Live CDs, Tails etc.)

[@GeekIWG]

Yes, it is still very common on Linux. You can even have a Live CD copy all of its files to RAM so that you can remove the disk afterwards and the entire OS will still work!

[@TheSimoc]

​@@GeekIWGYes, although sadly even most Linux distros have now grown into painfully bloated.

[@hayleyxyz]

@@TheSimoc Nah, disagree. You can just install what you want. For headless servers I use debian with no desktop environment. For a workstation I use kubuntu (basically stock Ubuntu with KDE Plasma instead of Unity). Neither are overly bloated IMO.

[@jschreiber6461]

@@hayleyxyz kudos & kubernetes to you!

[@TheSimoc]

@@hayleyxyz Unfortunately, couldn't disagree much more. Even though not worst kind of today's operating systems, Kubuntu definitely is overly bloated. Requiring RAM and CPU in magnitude of gigabytes and gigahertzes for mere OS to run, if that's not overly bloated, then nothing is. I don't take that strong stand about those CLI-only server distros as I'm not really familiar with them, what I know about them they are somewhat more tolerable in their resource usage, yet even they seem to be resource hogs considering that in the context of the video, we used to be able to painlessly run full-fledged GUI operating systems with just a few *megabytes* even from *ramdrive* , and with very few dozens of *megahertzes* . Especially with all those mainstream GUI Linux distros today (sure modern Windows systems even worse), the situation is equal (or actually, worse) to having modern passenger car bodies weighing 100 metric tonnes - no matter how cheap and efficient semi-truck engines we would have at disposal to make them move and accelerate fast regardless of their overly bloated body weight, it wouldn't undo the cruel truth that they could, would, and should still be called overly bloated.

[@thedungeondelver]

The Amiga's OS had this function as an automatic part of the OS and the RAMDisk could survive soft reboots, it was pretty awesome. I wish I'd known about the PC having that capability back when I made the jump!

[@ErazerPT]

The Amiga "version" was WAY ahead of everything you can still find today as it was dynamic. And even in Windows, you can still use a ram drive. IIRC Starwind still offers that driver for free. And even in these SSD/NVME days, it can still be useful

[@kevinsteinman8967]

On the Amiga there was the RAM: device and the RAD: device. The RAD: device is the one that survived soft reboots and was a monster. So I always had Workbench/Toaster stuff on the RAD: and mainly other stuff on the RAM: for very fast access and was great for LightWave and Video Toaster files. Just had to remember to back the RAM: to DH0: or DH1: time to time. Had to teach a news station on how that all worked with a borrowed A4000/060 with a Toaster from me for some things they wanted to try out. Basically the same thing he's doing here but in AmigaLand and had Compressed LHA Boot files on DH0: for system startup to save space on a whopping 80 meg HD. Was big in those days.

[@CptJistuce]

My 99/4a had a battery-backed RAM disk card installed. It was awesomed

[@Eysenbeiss]

People always only think about that x86 crap ... it's a pity, that Commodore had the wrong people on top, cause the 68k were superior and the OS .... everybody knowing about computer history knows, where Jobs stole most of "his" ideas from ....

[@CptJistuce]

@@Eysenbeiss Yes, we all know how the Macintosh GUI is largely copied from Xerox.

[@Geenimetsuri]

What most people don't know, is that XP also shipped with internal driver you could use to create a ramdrive! And, damn, that same thing is available even on Windows 10 (Device Manager -> Action -> Add Legacy Hardware -> Install Manually -> Show All devices -> Microsoft -> Windows RAM Disk Controller) Ooh boy!

[@timecomments]

Windows RAM Disk Controller I couldn't find it.

[@gizaha]

A native ramdisk in win10, that's exactly what i was searching for. Unfortunately it does not install and gives error after i press the last next button (w10 pro x64)

[@tony359]

I remember experimenting with the RAMDRIVE and DREAMING about having a big, large RAMDRIVE to run everything (basically, an SSD!). But my 386 had only 2MB of Ram and my friend's very expensive 386, only 4MB :)

[@Chris.Brisson]

Today, I'm using a 16 GB ramdrive on my i5-14500 system with 32 GB of ram. I have only 3.5 GB of free space on it.

[@mirek190]

Nowadays ram yes but not so much as you could imagine comparing to fast pcie 5 ssd. @@jschreiber6461

[@bitsundbolts]

It depends on your use case. If you need a large temporary "scratch" disk, let's say for editing a video, you'd be safe if you store temporary files on a ram drive. It will actually save a lot of write cycles to your SSD. There are applications to manage ram drives that store updated data on a binary level. So, you could change a file 20 times in memory, but it is written only once to the SSD after the time interval expires. There are legit cases when a ram drive is the best option.

[@tony359]

@arnolduk123 what a harsh comment! BuB has shown us how to use Ramdisk, he never said we should all stop using HDDs and start relying on volatile RAM! Sometimes these things are just for fun! After all it’s obsolete hw and sw! Take it easy!

[@jschreiber6461]

@@bitsundbolts Well said. Most people don’t understand ram != SSD. They have high perf, but not the same, and for application use cases where that performance diff matters, so does the write cycle count.

[@princemegahit]

When I upgraded from a 386 PS/2 to a Pentium motherboard I realized that the PS2 hard drive was not suitable for my new Pentium. I spent a few months using the Pentium with an 8MB ramdrive. This video reminded me of that time of creativity due to scarcity. Thank you.

[@TheSimoc]

Yep, and it was the time when we also had professionality in software industry, to not waste the scarce resources into code bloat which now takes most of the hardware resources. Miss thos times.

[@JARVIS1187]

I've played a lot with Ramdrives back in the day, but that was under Windows 95/98, after I learned that the Windows 98 boot diskette used a ram drive for diagnosis tools. Tried to make my own archive for that with used tools for the PCs in our home. Had the same drawback which you had tho: nothing I changed on the ram drive itself was saved in the archive without any help by myself.

[@damienbalbriggan]

Some seriously brilliant dos skills there well done great video. I also experimented with Ram drives back in the day but never had 32 MB.

[@monad_tcp]

4:43 lol I never thought about DOS having a "initramfs"

[@starnamedstork]

I did something like this more than 20 years ago. I made a bootable CD with a bunch of games, demos, tracker modules etc, and a fully working Windows 3.11 from RAM-drive. Still have it. Some years ago I had some fun with a colleague at work, and fired it up on two of his computers. When he came back his computers were running Windows 3 and Doom respectively.

[@coreykirkpatrick4392]

@bitsundbolts You could also add the -silent cmd line option for PKzip/PKunzip to hide the packing and unpacking file list on the screen, so you don't have to see a list of all the files go by, to clean up the boot process even more

[@bitsundbolts]

That may even reduce the boot time as I believe this ISA graphic card wastes a few CPU cycles to output all this text! I'll try it! Thanks for sharing

[@timecomments]

But the list gets exotic. Even in movies, people would be surprised if something happened on the screen. :)

[@bitsundbolts]

Not true. The fixed disk is not accessed when running anything from the ram drive. You only write when you tell it to - and due to the compression, you write less data. Sure, it's slower, but there are use cases when you want to have an unaltered DOS/Windows installation after a reboot. Similar to what O line emulators are doing - your data is valid for your current session only.

[@jschreiber6461]

@@bitsundboltsYup! That’s EXACTLY why I had a bank of such machines set up, as soon as the user timed out the machine would hard reboot. What I really would have liked is for the boot SSD/hard drive to either disconnect or become R/O once copy to ram was done.

[@jschreiber6461]

Thanks for the tip, I had something similar in piping the text out, but the -silent switch is better.

[@idahofur]

Years ago I picked up a 2meg ems memory card. Filled with dram chips. One of the options was using it as a ram drive. That was fun to load up word perfect on it and other programs. In my current Apple II plus. I have a Ram factor. You can use it to expand memory in Apple Works. You can also use it as a ram disk to.

[@puppylove3781]

And. We are learning. How to use. Periods correctly. Because of. Your pathetic sentence. structure.

[@MotownBatman]

Man, this would have been killer stuff to know when I was building retro gaming boxes out of killer PII & PII systems years ago.

[@The65c02]

I remember doing this in the 90's (although my Ramdrive was only 12Mbytes). Compared to Smartdrv caching I found that Ramdrive wasn't much faster when it came to opening programs but it did remove the hammering noise of the hard drive 🔊

[@muttBunch]

I remember my brother had an 88meg Syquest drive with X-Wing and Tie Fighter on it and we used to do this in the old days to run the game from a ram drive and its load time was so fast.

[@muttBunch]

@arnolduk123, how would it not load any faster? The Syquest drive I had was parallel, not SCSI. Had no room on hard drive, so all my games I ran from the Syquest disks. Didn’t care how long it took to copy to the ram drive because I would start it and go do something else and come back to it. I’d launch the game from the ram drive, so yes, it loaded way faster than running the games from the Syquest drive itself. If you were around back then and ever compared parallel to SCSI speeds, you would know SCSI was way faster but I didn’t have the luxury of the SCSI version with the card.

[@muttBunch]

@arnolduk123 ah, I see what you’re saying. In that respect, yes, it sucked waiting and seemed pointless lmao

[@Non-ICE]

Did this back in the 2000s on a Pentium II with 256MB RAM, 3.11 ran fast even loaded up Internet Explorer on it, never seen Internet Explorer so fast even before or after. Everything you clicked was completely loaded before you managed to release the mouse button.

[@RETROMachines]

Thank you very much. This video is motivation for the next build of MS DOS 7.1 or 6.22.

[@mauricen4676]

I fiddled around with ramdrive in the 90s but my 486 only had 4mb of ram so it wasn't very useful back then. Nowadays I use a ramdrive on my raspberry pi running pihole to store logfiles. I learned this the hard way because the first sd card died within a year.

[@knyshov]

I am just amazed he made a SIMM PCB. :) Nothing is impossible with access to PCB manufacturing!

[@Liam3072]

Fun fact: some modern CPUs have enough cache that we could theoretically, if we got full control of the cache, install Windows 95 on it! I wonder how fast Win95 could be on a cachedisk?

[@maxmuster7003]

The first level CPU cache is filled with instructions and with data from the last instructions with a memory access. And it is filled again every time if an instruction want to access an address with data that is not inside the cache, or new instructions are loaded from the memory. I think a far jump instruction clear the first level cache. No way to use the CPU cache for a drive.

[@maxmuster7003]

​@arnolduk123My last DOS PC mainboard Asus Striker with intel Core2quad@2700mhz, 8 gb DDR2 RAM, Radeon 9750 PCIe booting MS DOS 6.22 from selfmade Boot-CD floppy emulation 1.4 mb drive A:. Or booting MS DOS 6.22 from 2 gb USB stick FAT 16 format drive C: ready to startup all 4 cores for multiprocessing and swicthing into 64 bit mode from a 16 bit DOS application.😊

[@vanderlinde4you]

You can't use the cache as a regular disk. There was however one programmer, who managed to "load" a thing completely in cache, and was able to measure the speed of the cache on a AMD Epyc, which was in the terabytes per second speeds. If you want a ramdisk with extremely fast storage, consider a I-ram of Gigabyte. However that is so ancient, a modern SSD will beat it.

[@netsendjoe]

25 years ago, I was wondering why Windows couldn't be provided as a read/write hardware card. Basically a RAMDrive that would have a button cell battery on it to preserve its contents. I knew that avoiding mechanical drives would instantly make booting and running the OS so much faster. This video reminded me of that idea I had. And in many ways, this was most properly accomplished when SSD's were first introduced.

[@bzuidgeest]

That kind of setup was available 25 years ago. But it would be very expensive. Out of reach of consumers so you don't see it often. Booting dos from flash and such modules was very common on embedded systems even many years ago. Especially in environments with a lot of physical abuse that a mechanical drive just would not survive. There is a reason windows has an icon for this use case, it was used.

[@DefenderOfBoston-yo2tl]

Yes! I did know it and actually dabbled around with it back in the day. Didn't have enough RAM for it to be really useful at the time though. However, I always liked the idea and never forgot about it. It came in handy quite a few times over the years, most recently on a number of servers in a high performance computing scenario, where even NVMe SSDs were barely able to keep up with the requirements and we didn't want to tax them that heavily for data that is temporary anyway. Optane might have been an alternative, but it would have been much more involved as we were working on AMD Epyc and wanted it to stay that way. So we just went with putting more RAM into the machines and called it a day. Considering the history of Optane, I guess it was the right call. Still sad to see it go though, it is great stuff that too can be very useful in some scenarios (and can still do things nothing else can do yet).

[@vswitchzero]

Great video! I remember messing with ram drives a bit back in the day. But never had enough RAM available for it to be practical at all. Would love to give this a try for DOS benchmarking at some point 😁

[@simontay4851]

On my modern 64bit system with 16GB of RAM, i created an 8GB RAM drive with Super Speed RAM Disk Plus and set the pagefile.sys, temp folder and browser cache and download location to be on the RAM drive. I also use it as a working folder for editing large video files.

[@TravisBHartwell]

I did something like this, where I had a bootable floppy that had a zip of Wolfenstein 3D on it and it would create a RAM Disk and unzip it to the RAM disk on boot. My friends and I used this on the computers in our lab at school which had 4 MB of memory.

[@samshort365]

Sometime back in the 90s I had a laptop with a docking station. The hard drive on the computer crashed one evening, but I needed to get some.work done regardless so I created a bootable DOS CD that created a ram drive and copied the Windows directory to it, all 12mb of it. Running Windows like that was amazingly fast, efficient and actually enjoyable. I saved my work to floppy on the laptop as I went along, just in case.

[@a62dave]

I used ram drive as a working folder for saving files from Enable O/A. At the end of work, I ran a simple BAT file to copy everything from the ram drive to the 5.25” floppy. It was so much faster overall than saving to floppy every time.

[@kjellrni]

Would be cool to see this done booting over the network (PXE boot from TFTP) in stead of from the hard drive. Could have a diskless Windows PC that way. I did it with DOS, but never with Windows.

[@tristandunn4628]

I remember tinkering with this in the early 90s. The PC I was using was very limited, so there wasn't much I could realistically do with this. I was at college and we were programming Modula 2 with a compiler called TopSpeed. I think I set the PC up to copy and run TopSpeed from a Ramdrive. Seems like a different world when you think about everything that's happened in the last 30 years!!

[@911Salvage]

I think using a modern CF/SDXC card with an IDE to the relevant card adapter would give a very noticeable boost in performance while being easy to set up. Perhaps you can test this hypothesis in a future video.

[@peder6199]

In school around '87 we had PS/2 model 50 with 286 and 1Mb of ram, I set it up so I got a 384kb ramdrive and did my compiling there, saved a few seconds. 😀 most fun I remembered where when we discovered how to enable the 13h 256-color mode since Turbo Pascal 4 we had access to didn't support that.

[@thegreyfuzz]

We used to store all of the menu files and stuff that was accessed repeatedly for the BBS on a RAM drive to save on wear and tear as well as allowing for faster access (because 300-1200bps modem connections were so demanding!).

[@ErazerPT]

Nice, and it's nice that it's out of box, but you probably can get better results with rdsk or turbodisk, as used in freedos. If strict "original" is not needed, you can find A LOT of very improved MSDOS stuff these days, like for exemple CuteMouse and all manner of replacements. In fact, the best part of FreeDOS is not FreeDOS per se, but the insane amount of improved stuff you can get from their efforts and plug back into your 6.22 installs ;)

[@TonyP9279]

I had to write a lot of batch files using EDLIN so when DOS 5.0 came out, the EDIT was much more exciting than Windows!

[@maxmuster7003]

I like to use batch files as open source container to put the instruction of a routine inside to create a new executable com file with a little help from debug. Most of these special container batch files have to start with one or more parameter attached. Example to start with row color "text" attached: CENTER.BAT 8 1b "output center align". I made some videos(no speech) to show how it works and to share the batch files. Have fun.😊

[@mikeutoob]

A work colleague bought one of those PCI cards that take memory DIMMs and retains its data if you plug it with an external power supply. He had dreams of copying his C drive to it for really fast boots. At the time, SSDs were very new, but I think he still would have got more capacity at a cheaper price if he went with the SSD, although not as fast.

[@rendermanpro]

Forgotten tech, and most people doesn't know that it is possible to create ramdrives. Now when 64-128 gb is a normal thing imagine using ram drives for caching and temporary data. Using it for decades now. Winramthech is the best.and still available. But out of the box ramdrive in msdos is mindblowing! So ahead of the time, and how it was forgotten over time

[@batlin]

I used to do a similar trick with my 4mb Atari ST, extracting an archive from floppy into a (compressed!) ramdisk. The self-extracting Lharc archive contained the Sozobon C compiler and my preferred shell program which weren't normally usable without a hard drive, but super fast from the ramdisk.

[@maedero05]

Very early I had a XT with expanded memory, I created a LIM Ram drive boot from diskette on to the RAM playing my old Pacman ! -That´s a long way back !

[@4bl0xx30]

It’s like running Windows 3.11 from a SSD from back then. It’s kind of incredible that RAM is and ever will be faster than some third Level Storage like HDD and even SSD but today’s SSD’s are much faster than RAM from back then. But what I am wonder more is that if it’s possible to run DOS or even Windows 3.11 from the CPU’s Cache? On some CPU’s the Level 3 Cache should be big enough to Store on of these OS’s. I think it just needs some hardcore low level assembly programming.

[@4bl0xx30]

@arnolduk123 i dont see a problem by taking a cpu which has level 1, 2 and 3 cache and take the level 3 cache as "disk for windows". i dont think win3.1 apps could even use l3 cache so what. even some old cpu like a westmere xeon e7 has like 30mb level3 cache and still more level 1 and 2 cache than these old apps could ever use.

[@ssokolow]

I'm not at all surprised that Windows 3.1 just worked with the RAM drive. You're leveraging infrastructure intended to support network installs. For fun, get a copy of the Windows 3.1 Resource Kit and follow the "Setting Up A Shared Copy of Windows" instructions. You can have it write a read-only copy of Windows to your D: RAM drive and the config files and userdata to C:, where a slower disk won't be as big a deal.

[@shaunclarke94]

Does the comspec environment variable exist in DOS 6.22? Also Windows 9x has a RAM drive icon too from memory.

[@maxmuster7003]

Yes.

[@heroicnonsense]

I used to do the exact same on my Amiga (who's OS sets up a RAMDISK as standard after each boot). Just stuck a load of RAM on my accelerator and did pretty much the same exercise as you did but in AmigaOS. But I didn't compress the files first - I just copied them to the RAMDISK at each boot. Looking back your method would've been a lot faster! The Amiga I had, came with a slow 2.5" IDE hard drive, so boot was slooooow when using the RAMDISK route. But after that initial mandatory coffee break, it really flew!

[@bslprints9935]

I remember dedicating a portion of my 384k or ram to copy common DOS utilities to a RAM drive at boot (on a machine with only 1 floppy drive and no hard disk

[@Choralone422]

Back in the 486 days I had a machine with 12MB of RAM. I used to play Might & Magic 4 & 5 a lot, when installed together the 2 games would create "The World of Xeen." The game was a Wizardry style RPG where you moved from screen to screen around a map with a grid layout. The games only required 2MB of RAM to run correctly. I would setup SMARTDRV to use 9.5 MB of RAM as a disk cache similar to a RAM disk. After loading the game and playing for a few minutes it would start running almost exclusively from the SMARTDRV disk cache. Instead of the game taking a couple of seconds per move to load data from the HDD, when running from the SMARTDRV disk cache, screen updates from one screen to the next would happen instantly! If you weren't careful you could easily get yourself killed by moving around so fast but it sure made the game a lot of fun to play and much less tedious!

[@rautamiekka]

I'd hugely recommend maxing the compression. Without checking I dunno what PKZIP was capable of, but even then the Deflate-based ZIP can do a better job for the time.

[@porovaara]

With QEMM and a TSR you could set a global hotkey to run a shell and an execute a file. I used this to have a global save hotkey that would execute a batch file to save the contents of a ram drive to a hard disk at anytime.

[@georgemaragos2378]

Hi, this was well explained. A few years ago i picked up a win3.1 on a floppy program, some had put it together, it may have run dos 6.22 or dos 7 i cant recall. The main use was on my Pentium 200 and Pentium 4, to run 3.1 apps and games for win 3.1. It uses the same concept, boot of a floppy and unzip everything to ram drive then run windows

[@anthonyrasat7697]

Twenty years later I have implemented RAM disk to work with MySQL that made sort operations otherworldly fast. Not in DOS anymore but in linux.

[@Chris.Brisson]

When I upgraded my system memory, I paid $400 for 4 megabytes of RAM.

[@bitsundbolts]

Wow! In nominal terms, you would get ~128GB DDR4 memory for that money. Adjusted for inflation, memory got a lot less expensive if one would consider both being top of the line consumer products of their time.

[@Markworth]

I remember doing this for some reason or other, but I can't remember what it was for. IIRC, I needed it as a work around for some CD driver issue, but it was many years ago and the details evade me.

[@replica9000]

I used to have a 286 with a 10MB HDD. With DOS 6.22 and Win 3.1, it only consumed about ~7MB of disk space.

[@cricketol]

how much would the doom benchmark be on a ram drive vs the flash?

[@fattomandeibu]

My old Amiga 1200 from 1992 would automatically set up a dynamic(it would automatically resize itself when you copied and deleted files to and from it) RAM drive on startup as part of the OS, was very handy as we only had one floppy drive and no hard disk originally. Would appear on the desktop with the assigned volume of "RAM:". Kinda become redundant once I got a second floppy drive, but once I got the hard drive, bigger games and more RAM, sometimes I'd copy the game install folder over into RAM: for near instant load times.

[@timecomments]

Compiling Cobol code in 128Kb Ramdriver on of 640KB RAM on the 80286 in 1995 was really fast. It was flowing abundantly. I'm still using a 16Gb ramdriver. All of the browser's cache operations are still fast. But I never knew the method in this video. At that time, we were already learning things from magazines or something. We would place our finger on the floppy disk drive and follow the vibrations to see if the process was finished. Thanks for sharing. If we come back from the stone age or if I have a computer on Mars, I will try it. Uncle Bill will come there too, I know. When I described clicking a button on the screen, did people ask where? I miss the DOS days.

[@Graeme_Lastname]

Ahhh, the memory's of easier times. I do miss dos. Thanks m8. 🙂

[@lmotaku]

Yeah, a lot of products we take advantage of today were originally written in the 80s. Only thing that's changed is API layers and packaging. (Probably some algorithms & maybe a few languages, too)

[@alexandrustefanmiron7723]

Yes and I had Dyna blaster running from it. At that point I only had 4MB of RAM. Edit: last time was quite recent that I used a ram drive. It was to integrate a utility that takes an image, process it and output the result. The problem was that it was a py exe that would always uncompress itself the py runtime. For this I had a ram drive to save on time and ssd cycles!

[@ricdintino9502]

I think this is the first time I've heard someone mention that PCBWay is located in China.

[@jschreiber6461]

Now we need a performance comparison between SSD & ramdrive!

[@JimLeonard]

This is a nice overview, including pkzip's ability to only update or freshen files in an archive. But why are you using smartdrv when everything is in a ramdisk? It won't speed up the initial pkunzip at boot, because the .zip data is read only once during decompression to the ramdrive. (And it won't speed up reads/writes to the ramdrive either, for hopefully obvious reasons.) It won't really even speed up the save.bat pkzip update step, since the compression takes the most time in that process. So why did you continue to use it in the final setup?

[@FiveFishAudio]

Back then, compiling a dBase/Clipper '87 program took forever on a single floppy drive, numerous disk swaps needed. Installing RamDrive decrease compilation time a significant amount. Just remember to move contents of RamDrive to floppy drive.

[@Bedfford]

In fact, I use the same technique under win10 + ImDisk ToolKit for ramdisk + Robocopy for restore & backup. I put all temp files/folders and dozens of some cmd litle tools and batch files.

[@BoraHorzaGobuchul]

Some software can have troubles running from such ramdisk. There's a tool to overcome that (Google "Replacement (GUI + windows service) for ImDisk Toolkit". Haven't tried it though.

[@flavio-neri]

32mb of RAM was something unimaginable backing at that time.

[@jeffjenner5030]

We used to (those of us without heaps of ram) make a smaller ramdrive and transfer the command com to it.

[@rendermanpro]

It is alive. You can use ramdrives TODAY for caching, temp files and scrap data. It's faster than regular SSD 10x and similar or faster than latest NVMe drives. And another "hidden gem" is unlimited life cycle compared to SSD / NVMe. Modern programs for videoediting etc could eat hundreds Gb's of space with junk caching data, that tear and wear SSD. And now it could be huuuuge, like 32gb or larger.

[@handheldgaming4life]

I remember setting up my first RAM drive back in the 90s. Fun times... until you turned off the PC. 😂

[@lexluthermiester]

@BitsUndBolts While you make a good point about 32MB being enough, I have done this kind of thing before and found that 48MB or even 64MB gives much more "wiggle" room, or flexibility if you wish. Granted, that was on a 486, but still, more RAM is always better, even if some of it goes unused. It's always better to have more than you need rather than to need more than you have.

[@beardedgaming1337]

when i was a kid i got a macintosh. they had built in ram disk from memory control panel. i used that a lot to play with things. my friend had a 3.1 system and it was totally foreign to me. of course i wanted to play with it. i found the ram drive files, played with that a lot but i never got it working for anything other than just loading doom onto... by the time i was in Jr. high we had windows 98 and macos 9.1 so the ram drive stuff faded away. however in 2007 or so i had a phenom II system with a 256mb 9600 Nvidia. farcry 2 lagged pretty bad on high texture settings. i made a 4gb ram drive and installed the game there - buttery smooth game play now that it wasnt so limited by 256mb Vram

[@firstsurname9893]

It's a shame that the RAM disk can't survive reboots, which was a useful but not well known feature of the Amiga's OS.

[@borchen0]

This recoverable ramdisk was called RAD: You could even boot from it. When I had an Amiga with enough memory (8mb) I even could configure multiple of these! It was like using a cartridge when playing a game. The regular ramdisk of the Amiga was called RAM: and did not survive a reboot.

[@vanderlinde4you]

Because it's none volatile memory - once power cuts off the data is gone.

[@kienhwengtai8113]

Kinda wanted to that but never had enough RAM to try it

[@perfectionbox]

RAM was so expensive in the old days that women would make marriage decisions on how much RAM a boyfriend had in their PC 🤣

[@OpenGL4ever]

It's better to create a bin folder for personal commands and add that folder to the PATH variable. This way you don't clutter up your root directory. The power of such a bin folder can be increased with batch files.

[@bitsundbolts]

You're correct - didn't think of that.

[@raysgarage2351]

Ed to do this all the time loading games to a ram drive made them load levels much faster

[@BongoFerno]

Modern CPU can hold the entire hard disk of windows 95 in CPU cache memory

[@affegpus4195]

few years ago after building a brand new computer I kept having random stutters that would keep going 10 secs or so and then stop. and one of the things I did when I was running out of places to look for what was causing the stuttering was make a ramdrive and move the whole games to it, then make a sym link to point it to the ram drive. Funny is that disc access was not the cause of the stuttering which one day just stopped happening out of nonwhere

[@ricargoncalves]

No, I didn't know about RamDrive native functionality. Quite amazing the see such advanced technologies are in fact old. But I guess its use was more limited back in the days due to limited memory. Do you actually have an use for this not just being neat? And the booting process isn't actually slower with this? Great video, keep up with the good stuff!!

[@bitsundbolts]

Yes, the boot process is a bit slower because it needs to extract the entire archive to RAM. However, if you have an old hard drive that is slow in Access time, this setup could be faster. And I am sure that windows feels a lot snappier when loaded from memory than a spinning disk drive.

[@OpenGL4ever]

That's true. The limited memory limited the usage of a RamDrive. I only had 8 MiB in my PC and 8 MiB were required for some later games. And in Windows 3.1 you needed all the RAM for Windows and Windows applications to prevent Windows from using a pagefile. Today the situation is much better, I use the RAM device /dev/shm/ to fiddle around with files that I don't necessarily need to persist. This reduces the wear out load on my SSD.

[@lasskinn474]

the use case was for if you had no budget limits and/or if the program was small. most programs were fairly small and most programs and games were not written to copy themselves entirely in ram if there was space in ram to do that. ramdrive is one of those things that has always kind of existed in that space. you can get benefits from using a ramdrive for development work and stuff nowadays still, but the cases where it helps are such that take a lot of space :d if I had 4x the ram I'd put gradle on a ramdrive. if you got smaller apps that trash their log or profile folders putting those on a ramdrive can help a lot still, you can do that in win11 or whatever and some use cases it's not that much of space you even need, just like a gig or so for a browser profile or similar.

[@ricargoncalves]

​@@OpenGL4everYes indeed! On my daily Windows I have my ImDisk set up. I have a quite good amount of RAM and it is very useful having a RAM disk. The temp folder is set to that drive and often I use it to extract archives or any fiddle with temporary files. I even had virtual machines running of a disk in ram. Quite interesting!

[@ricargoncalves]

​@@lasskinn474 Yes, ramdisks are a very useful tool. I just see its use a bit more limited back in the days. Tell me about it!... Gradle, Maven, IntelliJ... ideally would be everything that have Java in the name should be in RAM, including JavaScript. What would be interesting was to put everything in RAM. In cache would be even better!!! On my daily Windows I have my ImDisk set up. I have a quite good amount of RAM and it is very useful having a RAM disk. The temp folder is set to that drive and often I use it to extract archives or fiddle around with any temporary files (sometimes just copying files to see how fast it can go!). I even had virtual machines running of a disk in ram. Quite interesting!

[@alexloktionoff6833]

8088/6 can address more than 1MB, every memory cycle it outputs internal state, so code, stack, data segments could be separated addressing more than 1MB. And it's not MMU strictly speaking, just use those bits for address.

[@le9038]

Will you be building a proper solution for having to manually save your session every time you want to shut down your system? I think this will improve the user experience.

[@DieSonneSchicktKeineRechnug]

Sehr gut erklärt!

[@annybodykila]

Very nice, thank you. Im going to use this with autohotkey, as i currently have multiple scripts that talk to each other by writing and reading an ini file, i dont like using the hdd as ram, all i have to do is store the ini file in the new ramdisk. 👍👏😁

[@brick6347]

Didn't have a PC till about 1994, before that just Amigas. The ram disk was useful on my A500 for copying floppies. I don't think I used it much on my 1200 as that a HD.

[@DelticEngine]

Very nice! This is what I used to do myself back in those days. It's unfortunate that Windows no longer ships with a RAMdrive software as with modern systems able to take so much RAM that most applications will never use this would be an ideal way to utilise spare RAM capacity. I use a RAMdrive on my current Windows system and have it configured as location for all temporary files that normally litter the system. My web browsers are configured to use it as well. All the cookies and data for web browsing stays for as long as my machine is running which enables me to restart a browser and have it all still work rather than have temporary files deleted on browser shutdown. The RAMdrive makes it all faster and has the advantage that anything potentially harmful is gone forever when I shut my system down. A large RAMdrive could be useful for gaming in that loading and saving a game would be much faster. This could be implemented by starting the game through a batch file that sets up the RAMdrive, copies all the necessary files, starts the game, and on exiting the game archives any changes. This is double-edged sword in that, on the one hand, a system crash could lose all game changes if the RAMdrive contents had not been archived yet, and on the other hand no corrupted or garbled data from such a crash would be written to the hard drive so everything would still work as if the crash had never occurred in the first place.

[@DoctorOnkelap]

one of the other commenters explains that in fact modern windows systems stilll can do this natively but you need to enable it.

[@DelticEngine]

@@DoctorOnkelapIf you're referring to 'prefetch' and 'superfetch', those are not the same as a RAMdrive. They can be of some benefit sometimes, but I prefer to keep them disabled as they massively slow down system startup and needlessly thrash the storage subsystem. They is also little control over them, whereas with a RAMdrive you have full control.

[@DoctorOnkelap]

​​@@DelticEngine no the earlier comment mentioned going to device manager > action > add legacy hardware > install manually > show all devices > microsoft > windows ramdisk controller

[@DelticEngine]

@@DoctorOnkelapAre you actually using this yourself? In what version of Windows? In Windows 10 it's supposedly a non-functional 'sample' driver that needs modification to work, assuming it actually works at all and isn't just there to keep up appearances for some legacy application. Interesting, though.

[@Ale.K7]

Loved this!

[@molly_mallard]

I always used DRDOS back then.

[@awilliams1701]

I was aware, but I didn't see the point. There was never enough ram. I remember how excited I was when I built my Vista PC with 8gb of ram. enough ram that I could turn off the swap file completely. That was a first. I never thought I'd see that day. Now days I don't even think windows supports it anymore. I haven't seen those options in years.

[@awilliams1701]

ok nope, it's still there. It seems pointless though. lol

[@GeeeAus]

Could you compress the ram drive with double space?

[@jozsiolah1435]

I had ramdrive, in Win 3.1 file manager its icon is a chip. The files can be opened much faster with ramdrive , but after shutdown the files will be lost, if they are not saved.

[@Chriva]

Do a hex compare on the generated archives. Even tho it can update single files, I still think it's going to change the data of the whole archive, thus creating even more flash wear for every update you make

[@bitsundbolts]

You're correct that if PKZIP does write the full archive even when only a few files need to be updated, then we're writing a lot of extra data to the drive. This solution makes a lot more sense when using an old spinning drive as permanent storage media.

[@klafbang]

I had two XT class computers back in the day. I tried setting one up with a 512 KiB RAM drive and share it over serial cable to the other. It was not fast.

[@glenncaughey5044]

Ramdrive was perfect for Windows’ temporary swapfile. WFWG 3.11 with 64MB ram.

[@mephitusincognito7918]

the fact that such works better than just using straight ram shows how badly windows is written.. [edit] i thought i was the only weird one that found this trick...

[@Vile-Flesh]

This is AMAZING. I didn't know anything about this. I had heard of "RAM drives" that had battery packs to retain the stored data after shutting the machine off but I didn't know that DOS had a provision to actually use the system memory for storage in this way. Could this be done on a 486 with DOOM2 loaded on the RAM drive and DOOM2 executed and played 100% off of the RAM?

[@bitsundbolts]

Yes, you can put Doom on a RAM drive on a 486 system and play it from there.

[@Lachlant1984]

I understand the concept of doing this, but what I'd like to know is what are some practical reasons why you'd want to do this?

[@TheBacktimer]

Demo system in a store for example that you want to be fresh on every reboot even if people mess with it. Or for safety reasons - infection cured just by rebooting:) I think in my school they used sort of a similar thing, except it was a physical card that wiped any changes to the base system.

[@Lachlant1984]

@@TheBacktimer Yes, my high school were trialling such a card, I believe it was called the Zero Card, they didn't end up using them, too expensive I'd wager. But they sure needed them, students did some very irritating things to some of the computers, completely messing them up for other students.

[@Lachlant1984]

@@TheBacktimer It just occurred to me, do you think those cards acted as a sort of RAM disk on a card, storing important data and then being wiped when shutting down the computer? How else could such a card work? I think these days this kind of computer security is done via software programs such as HDGuard.

[@Lachlant1984]

@arnolduk123 What would you use a scratch disk for?

[@SynthwaveDuck]

You're my hero

[@sku_101]

good old memorys.. thx

[@stevedoki]

Man, you’re awsome!!!!