RAM Drive Question
Hi Fred, I have been using a ramdisk for IE6 since reading "Speed And Security Via A RAM Drive" ( http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=57704017 ) on its advantages and in fact, noticed a significant performance improvement. A few days ago I was having a problem that was driving me nuts so I decided to go back to a previous "Restore Point". What a shock I got when I looked for a point-in-time to use and discovering that there was none! Things like this is how I always get sidetracked from the task at hand. After many hours of digging around, I noticed an event in the System Event Log that I had seen before but thought nothing of it:
"The System Restore filter encountered the unexpected error '0xC0000010' while processing the file 'MSI231fc.tmp' on the volume 'Ramdisk'. It has stopped monitoring the volume."
It turns out that when this happens (at every boot) the Restore Manager determines that all previous Restore Points must also be invalid and deletes them. OK, lesson learned. Just disable the ramdisk from System Restore monitoring, but the ramdisk doesn't appear in the drive list. I thought, probably because it's already been disabled, so I turned off System Restore all together and re-booted. Still can't find the ramdisk in the System Restore disk monitoring list. Any ideas on how to get System Restore and ramdisks to get along? I am using AR Soft Ramdisk.
Like all your readers, I totally enjoy your newsletter and have a high regard for your opinions! Keep 'em coming. ---Gary
In that article, we discussed using a RAM drive as a *great* place for transient data such as temp files; and as a host for certain kinds of very heavy disk-intensive operations. In the former case, it's a self-emptying cache. In the latter, the disk operations can take place at the speed of RAM, which works at nanosecond speeds (billionths of a second), six orders of magnitude faster than the millisecond speeds (thousandths of a second) of memory operations written to a hard drive. Six orders of magnitude is a *lot:* Very roughly, it's the difference between, say, the height of an average human and the height of Mount Everest!
But as the article also says, their weakness is that they're ephemeral. Nothing in a RAM drive survives a reboot, or the disabling of the RAM drive. That data only "lives" in RAM, so when the RAM is emptied or powered down, the data goes away. That's why System Restore doesn't track what's going on in a RAM drive: It's all going to be deleted at shutdown anyway, so tracking interim deletions doesn't make a lot of sense. A RAM drive is a lousy place for critical data such as system files that might need to be restored.
More generally, there may be problems related to drive letters that change when the RAM drive is present or not. You might try making the RAM drive the last drive on your system, say, the Z: drive. That way, when the drive comes and goes, it won't be affecting the drive letters of the rest of the (permanent) drives on your PC, which may be what was giving System Restore heartburn. (If, say, a drive that's monitored as "E:" turns into "D:" at reboot, SR may toss up its virtual hands and quit, not knowing what data goes where.)
Also, the specific RAM drive you're using may matter: RAM drives can be coded very differently, and they can start up at different points in the boot process (or even on demand, after boot); and they can present themselves to the system in different ways. If one particular RAM drive doesn't work the way you want, the simple answer might be to try a different one.
If nothing you change on the RAM drive side of the equation helps, then you might want to look at the System Restore side: System Restore is useful, but only in *very* limited ways. It also can actively work *against* you in many instances, such as in trying to remove some classes of malware. (See http://tinyurl.com/z4gr7 ) Perhaps the answer is simply to avoid System Restore and similar tools. (That's what I do.)
Anyway, lots more on RAM drives:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=57704017
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=RAM+drive&as_sitesearch=langa.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=RAM+drive
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