Those of you who are Amiga veterans from the 80′s and early 90′s will be familiar with the oh-so-useful RAM: disk. A virtual device that treated your unused system RAM as a disk device that you could extract temporary files to and make a general mess of without worrying about cleaning it up later, because when you rebooted, the content of the RAM disk would be cleared. The amount of data you could put in it was simply limited to how much physical RAM you had. The RAM disk was always 100% full because it was dynamic in nature. If you had 10MB of data in there, then the RAM disk consumed 10MB of system RAM. If you only had 2MB of data in there, then it only consumed 2MB of system RAM – the RAM disk never impacted on the rest of system memory in a prejudiced fashion.

Microsoft DOS and Windows have tried to replicate this feature with limited success, and the RAM disk was always a fixed size and pre-allocated from the rest of the system as well, which made it somewhat useless. If you had a 512MB RAM system and allocated 50MB for the RAM disk, then you only had 462MB left for the rest of the system, and this also meant that you could not put more than 50MB of data into the RAM disk.

Ubuntu Linux (and pretty much every other distro) has its own RAM disk feature as well and is just as flexible as the Amiga’s RAM disk in its use. Here’s a guide on how to use it.

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