Back before my work routine included frequent Internet dialups, I used to run my PowerBook 5300 off a RAM disk most of the time in blissful silence except for key clicks and occasional hard drive spinups to save documents.

This was on a machine with just 24 MB of RAM, and accomplished by using a stripped-down minimal installation of MacOS 7.5.2, a likewise minimal install of Microsoft Word 5.1, GlobalFax software, and a few other small utilities. The setup worked well for my needs at the time, which were mainly word processing and faxing, and running off RAM mitigated the PB 5300’s sluggish performance significantly.

It’s been more than a couple of years since I booted off a RAM disk to do actual work. These days I need frequent Internet access and usually have somewhere between 15 and 25 applications open, so with 96 MB of RAM on my PowerBook G3, even conventional operation is sometimes marginal (moral: buy more RAM than you think you will need).

However, I still love the RAM Disk concept -- both the lightning speed and the silent running, and I highly commend it to folks who have less rigorous memory demands. RAM disks also extend running time under battery power significantly. On a Lombard (bronze keyboard G3 series PB) you might get as much as sevan or eight hours computing on a single battery charge.

MacWorld Mac Secrets 5th Edition by David Pogue and Joseph Schorr (Copyright 1999 IDG Books) contains an excellent tutorial on RAM disk use, as well as a wealth of other useful information. I got a copy last spring, and it’s a wonderful resource. However, for those without access to this great book, MacSpeedZone has conveniently posted the chapter on RAM disks and Virtual Memory use for Powerbooks on their Website by permission of the publisher.

Pogue and Schorr walk you through the process of making a stripped-down operating system (still in the 12 MB ballpark with OS 8.5 or 8.6, alas), loading and booting from a RAM disk, admonitions about saving your work to the hard disk frequently, and choosing a small word processor (they particularly recommend Mariner Write, although they say that my old stalwart, Word 5.1 will do in a pinch). They generally recommend avoiding Microsoft software for RAM disk use, since “they’re huge, and they need to read information from the hard drive a lot.”

Indeed, I found the most annoying thing (other than the size ceiling) about running my Powerbook 5300 off a RAM disk was the hard disk spinning up unexpectedly to answer some unknown application demand. I wish I had had Pogue and Schorr’s book back then, because they even have the answer to that: “Drag your hard-drive icon to the Trash!”

Apparently, if the hard drive is off the screen, the application will not be able to find it and spin it up. Cool!

As the authors summarize, “At last you’ve arrived at an amazing point. Your PowerBook is absolutely silent, runs about three times faster than it ever did before, barely using any battery juice at all. You can type and scroll and save and trash things, and you’ll never get that sinking feeling of hearing your hard drive spin up.”

To read David Pogue and Joseph Schorr’s RAM disk tips, visit this MacSpeedZone page:

http://www.macspeedzone.com/frames/secretmacframe.html

Charles W. Moore

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September 06, 2008