Comments on: Create a RAM Disk in Mac OS X

By: Dasher

Dasher — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 01:06:41 +0000

Any experience creating a RAM disk, specifically for helping iTunes run faster? I am on a 2006 Imac 21″ CoreDuo with 2GB RAM. Snow leopard latest. ITunes library is 500GB, so library file is 25MB and the library xml is 136MG. The genius lib file is 1.2GB.
Anyway, running alone, iTunes is sluggish giving the spinning wheel anytime I ask it to do anything that writes to or reads from disk the itunes Library file. So managing the collection, sorting names playlist creations and modification, all the daliy doings of my music maintenance involve this library file being accessed all the time. I think this is at the core of my sluggish iTunes. Mac OS activiity monitor shows free ram, and a modest 40GB virtual memory use. Even when other apps are involved, there is still free RAM. anyway, as soon as I ask itunes to do something in a new field, like go from scrolling artists to viewing the main list, and clicking sort all songs by date added..boom boom pow, i get the damned rainbow wheel.
Would a RAM disk help. Can I direct iTunes to use RAM disk scratch space, or perhaps create an applet that will pair with Itunes launching, create a RAM disk and create a fresh copy of the iTune library there, and keep it synced with the master library file there on the internal HD. Then tell iTunes to use this new RAM disk copy of the library file.
any thoughts or advice appreciated!

By: Colin Dean

Colin Dean — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:52:15 +0000

“diskutil erasevolume HFS+ “ramdisk” `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://1165430`” works fine for me on 10.6.2.

By: James Smith João Pessoa, Brazil

James Smith João Pessoa, Brazil — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:57:57 +0000

This doesn’t work with Snow Leopard. I’d like to have something that works with 10.6.2. As a scratch disk for Final Cut Express, a RAM disk would be great.

By: Mario

Mario — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:18:43 +0000

Created 10 GB RAM disk and I get up 1.1 GB/s write speeds, and 1 GB/s read speeds.

Now if I could get an SSD with these transfer rates, I’d be a happy camper .

Photoshop performance is improve significantly if you put your PS cache into RAM disk (and since I have 32 GB of RAM, and PS CS4 is still only 32 bit in OS X, I can create 20 GB RAM disk and still have plenty of RAM to run PS and lots of other apps).

By: Joel

Joel — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:31:04 +0000

Created 2 1GB RAM disks on my MacPro, hit 405MB/s transfer rate – This is a terrific idea for Photoshop, the GUI should be built into OS X.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs2nZiZsVdA

By: Easily make a RAM or Scratch Disk in Mac OS X - OS X Daily

Easily make a RAM or Scratch Disk in Mac OS X - OS X Daily — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:03:41 +0000

[...] you’d rather not download anything, you can follow our command line instructions to create a ram disk in mac os x using no third party downloads or utilities, only the [...]

By: Timo

Timo — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:57:22 +0000

Will ramdisk increase perfomance of webserver with mysql & php?

By: Peter Bjorn

Peter Bjorn — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 02:49:36 +0000

diskutil erasevolume HFS+ “ramdisks” `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://1165430`;

I used that to make a ram disk that is 500mb

By: Tesselator

Tesselator — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:35:05 +0000

Edit:

(or the 32 GB total) should read: (of the 32 GB total) in the above message.

Sorry.

By: Tesselator

Tesselator — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:30:23 +0000

I haven tried these scripts but I used “Espérance DV” mentioned in the first reply here. It’s great but it only allows 2 GB in size. I want 20 GB and then just keep 12 (or the 32 GB total) for apps and stuff. I benchmarked the Espérance DV RAM drive and the results can be seen here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=7838758&postcount=4

Enjoy.

By: Gedeon

Gedeon — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:23:14 +0000

I have just downloaded the free RAMDISK program .dmg file and it puts a ramdisk on the desktop which takes room from the internal hard disk so is it indeed a RAM disk? it does not seem so – therefore what is the point of it – a disk within the hard disk!?

By: Gedeon

Gedeon — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:23:07 +0000

By: CrashPlan.nl online backup

CrashPlan.nl online backup — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:57:27 +0000

Over here on OS X 10.5.6 (on intel mac mini 2,1) we receive the same error as mikey.

Unknown volume, that is unmountable.

$ hdiutil detach /dev/disk1
“disk1″ unmounted.
hdiutil: couldn’t eject “disk1″ – error 49168

$ df
Filesystem 512-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2 254341856 13817784 240012072 6% /
devfs 211 211 0 100% /dev
fdesc 2 2 0 100% /dev
map -hosts 0 0 0 100% /net
map auto_home 0 0 0 100% /home
/dev/disk1 2097152 24664 2072488 2% /private/tmp/ramdisk1

By: mikey

mikey — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 12:18:48 +0000

I tried these commands and fter a couple errors and guessing, I ended up with an unknown volume that I cannot access or delete!

df
Filesystem 512-blocks Used Avail Cap Mounted on
/dev/disk2 985 19 966 2% /private/tmp

hdiutil detach /dev/disk2
“disk2″ unmounted.
hdiutil:couldn’t eject “disk2″ – error 49168

Any thoughts?
thanks,
mikey

By: The Cave » Blog Archive » Mac RAM Disk

The Cave » Blog Archive » Mac RAM Disk — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:58:29 +0000

[...] Simple enough: [...]