New utility: Make RAM Disk
Make RAM Disk is a simple app to create and mount a RAM disk on Mac OS X 10.4 or later. It encapsulates my previously-stated series of terminal commands into a tiny little app—just launch it and go.
I use my RAM disk for three things:
- Download holding area. I have Mail, Safari, OmniWeb, and Adium all set to download files to the RAM disk. If I decide I don’t want to keep the download, I just leave it there until shutdown (only works on my desktop Mac).
- iShowU storage. I create a 1-GiB RAM Disk named “iShowU temp” which iShowU is set to use as its scratch disk. Using a RAM disk for this helps your recording frame rate.
- Xcode build folder. On my laptop, I symlink the project’s build folder over to the RAM disk (e.g., mkdir /Volumes/RAM\ Disk/Adium-build && ln -s /Volumes/RAM\ Disk/Adium-build build). This cuts out a lot of the disk grinding that happens during a build, which I believe helps my battery life.
Enjoy!
September 29th, 2007 at 19:07:25
Shouldn’t the ln command in the Xcode build example be the opposite way, “ln -s /Volumes/RAM\ Disk/Adium-build/ build”, or am I misunderstanding what you’re trying to achieve? Your example produces errors and not much else since the Adium-build folder you’re linking to already exists.
September 29th, 2007 at 19:45:08
berdan: You’re right. Sorry about that. Fixed.
December 2nd, 2007 at 19:51:52
Here is my experience using a RAM disk to make my builds faster: http://blog.mousefeed.com/2007/12/faster-build-compilation-with-ram-disk.html
This setup is on Linux, but it is close enough to what you described.
December 2nd, 2007 at 20:44:58
Andriy: Rock on. It was good to read in your post that Linux’s RAM disk is lazy, like Mac OS X’s.