Starting with Windows ME, more accurately WinNT the ability to have a Microsoft officially supported RAM drive in Win2K or Win XP has disappeared.
Microsoft themselves however still use it during installs and rescue boots so they are not completely unaware of its uses and advantages.
It cannot be beat for its simplicity of use and speed of operation for small or even large files and programs. In a network environment where many computers need shared access to certain files its impact is even more dramatic. It is a true virtual disk.
Shared memory is a poor relation to RAM drive: its complex to program and doesn’t have the take for granted myriad functions of disk files.
Their official support attitude towards RAM drive is perhaps summed up in the comments one tech support made a short while back:
” a RAM drive uses memory that the OS can manage much more effectively and which it might need for itself anyway”. And this made in an age of cheap memory. WinXP on a 256MB system is really going to be impacted more by a 10Mb RAMdrive than by setting aside a shared memory area of the same size. The tech had no real idea of what a RAM drive is.
Personally, I think the decision was made to kill RAM drive due to two reasons:
1. MS cannot get it to work properly. You nay remember back in the days of Windows 3.1, a RAM drive in conjuction with a modem application running at more than 9600 bps was a recipe for problems. Even in Win98, I see an occasional glitch where the FAT of the RAM drive doesn’t immediately reflect changes to the file size.
2. RAM drives are politically incorrect. The decision to kill it was made by the same idiot – since promoted, who wrote a deathless piece of prose about it in the manuals that used to be included in the price of the OS. He stated that a disk cache using Smartdrv was a superior solution. Another reason supporting the politically incorrect theory is take a look in Win2k’s Help for old DOS batch and config commands and which ones have been superceeded etc. Conspicuosly absent is – you guessed it: ramdrive.sys
