A RAMDisk acts as a virtual drive on your system. It allows you to create directories, copy files to and from it, etc.... The data however is not written onto a hard disk, but remains purely stored into a particular part of the RAM memory. Hard disks have mechanical parts that are needed to seek to a particular position on the magnetic storage media and to read/write data. This makes them relative lazy. A RAMDisk does not need to seek , and by this , it can read and write the same data to upon 30-60 times faster than a hard disk ! However, the data stored in RAM is "volatile" : it disappears when you cut off the power to the RAM memory, in other words, if you turn off your system. This applies to the content of the RAMDisk too !

A ramdisk can perfectly be used to store :

• web content of web servers.
• temporary index files and tables of database servers ( MS-SQL-Server , MySQL , ...).
• temporary files ( TEMP and TMP environment variable ) and "Temporary Internet Files".
• the scratch disk for Adobe (R) Photoshop (R).
• games and installed programs. The startup times of programs may decrease drastically !
• audio and video capture / editing.
• creation and playback of slide shows.
• data that has to be written to CD , to prevent underrun during the burn process.
• as storage of the "ReadyBoost" cache on Vista.
• all kinds of data that may be lost ( or MUST be lost for security reasons ) at shutdown.

The RAMDisk "Enterprise" is based on the proven technology of its predecessor "RAMDisk Pro 5.2.10.2" , praised for its stability and reliability. The Enterprise covers following features :

• One unique 32-bit version that runs on all 32-bit versions of Windows 2000 , XP , Server 2003 and Vista ( monoprocessor or multiprocessor )
• One unique 64-bit version that runs on all 64-bit versions of Windows XP ( with Service Pack 2 ) , Server 2003 and Vista ( monoprocessor or multiprocessor )
• Auto formatting to FAT12 , FAT16 , FAT32 or NTFS / NTFS with compression
• Auto resizing to the maximal available ( or allowed ) ramdisk size
• Comprehensive fine tuning of the available memory to balance maximal ramdisk size against OS stability
• Easy to use and to configure from within the device tree of Device Manager

The RAMDisk Enterprise brings also powerful features such as :

• Increased ramdisk sizes, theoretically to up to 64 GB using PAE and if supported by the OS. ( The /PAE switch may be needed in boot.ini on systems that use more than 4 GB physical RAM ).
• Ability to load a raw disk image to format and populate the ramdisk at driver initialization ( load speed : ~ 30 sec/GB using an image stored on a mode 4 IDE ATA HD with a 1.2 Ghz processor ).
• Ability to save the content to a raw disk image at shutdown and at regular intervals or at particular times.
• No conflicts with other, existing RAMDisk software on the market. The RAMDisk Enterprise can be installed together with any other ramdisk, provided that the ramdisks can allocate their appropriate free space in the RAM memory.