If you need the memory for something, Windows will instantly discard the cached data. Windows uses unused memory to cache files anyway, and it does it all automatically and in the background. RAM disks also reserve a good chunk of your memory, ensuring you can’t use it for anything else. RELATED: Why It's Good That Your Computer's RAM Is Full Either way, once you load the application, it will stay present in your memory for quick loading later. Once your computer loads an application or other files form its hard drive, it caches them in RAM anyway - so it’s a bit silly to install an application or game in a RAM disk rather than on your hard drive. In other words, you’re simply getting faster program-load times at the expense of longer boot-up times. When you turn on your computer, the RAM disk program would have to read the RAM disk image from your hard drive and load it back into RAM.

You may want to do this automatically every few minutes or just at shut down. You’d have to save a copy of your RAM disk to your computer’s hard drive to ensure you wouldn’t lose your Photoshop installation.

For example, let’s say you installed Photoshop to your RAM disk. So saving files to the RAM disk is pointless unless you don’t care that you’d lose the files - but if you didn’t care about the files, why save them in the first place?īecause RAM isn’t persistent, you’d also have to save the contents of your RAM disk to disk when you shut down your computer and load them when you turn it on. This means that you can’t store anything important on a RAM disk - if your computer crashed because of lost power, you’d lose all the data in your RAM disk. When your computer loses power, the contents of your RAM will be erased. This would mean faster application load times and faster file read/write times for files saved in the RAM disk. When you save a file, it would happen almost instantly as it would just be copied to another portion of RAM. If you installed programs in a RAM disk, you’d have near-instant load times because their data would already be stored in the fastest memory possible. Initially, this seems like it could help optimize performance.

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