Mac Fans, Max performance: Creating a RAM Disk on the fly.

[Exadata]

Watch this video and you can skip to the 5:45 min point and get started:

You'll need this to copy and paste when creating the RAM Disk App. in Automator.


// Take the size RAM disk you want to create in GB and multiply by 2048 and use that as your number at the end of this string.

diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'RAM Disk' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://2048000`



Found this to be pretty cool and I totally forgot about it but, rediscovered it. The video lays it all out. Create your RAM Disk App., open it, load whatever app into it you want and run it from the RAM Disk for maximum performance.

For example, I created a 4GB RAM Disk and copied Adobe Photoshop (most beefy app I have) and copied over an image to the RAM Disk to edit. Photoshop opened in under 3 seconds and editing was much faster.

How big should your RAM Disk be? Just right click the app or file and "get info" and note the size and go from there.

REMEMBER: Save any files from the RAM DISK to your HDD/SSD. For example, after editing a photo in Photoshop (running off the RAM Disk) I would save it to my Pictures on my SSD.

I hope everyone finds this to be fun for the whole family

 

[wayne77]

I use RAM disk for transcoding plex. Speeds things up nicely.

 

[TonyPHX]

Everything old is new again, and that is a good thing because I used to do this and forgot about it. Thank you for posting this @Exadata and thank you @wayne77 for giving me a good use case to do this again! Apparently you CAN teach an old dog new tricks. : )

 

[Exadata]

I also like how Apple has the "unused RAM is wasted RAM" motto so, I have 32GB RAM and usually ~12GB is used and the rest will be used as a RAM cache temporarily storing recently used stuff. In case it is needed again, it is ready to be fetched/used right from the RAM instead of having to ping the HDD/SSD.