Hi, all.

Been a very happy user, but I wanted to report a new way that I've found to load up and test (or normally use) portable apps, and that's by way of a RAM disk. One package, Radeon Ramdisk, which is a repackaging of another product, Dataram RAMdisk, gives you the ability to save off a RAM disk you've populated as a file to your hard drive, then load it up again later. It looks like a nice way to keep a local suite of utilities up to date or to prototype a real thumbdrive with. The software is free for up to 4GB of RAM disk. Otherwise, it's $18.95 per seat.

Hope this helps.

--IJ.

I saw AMD's rebranding of the Dataram software, too, but there are other RAMdisk drivers out there to consider, some of them open source or at least free. Did you look at ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver? Romex Software makes a couple interesting products, one named FancyCache that's in beta and free for the time being.

Personally I'm seriously considering a large (24+GB) RAMdisk as an alternative to a caching SSD. My personal anecdotal experience with SSDs is a 100% failure rate, so I'm done messing with SSDs unless they can get this alleged new heat-reviving SSD technology to market ASAP *AND* fix the issues with the controller circuits failing so frequently (there's nothing like having perfectly good Flash with your data on it that you can't access because the controller blew up). Otherwise I'm waiting for memristor or whatever Next Big Thing comes along first and considering this giant RAMdisk in the meantime. RAM is pretty cheap these days.