This is a quick guide to help you set up a ram disk inside windows 7,8,10
The main reason i setup an 8gb ram disk was to increase productivity with adobe products. and it did. with benchmarking this drive, i have achieved read/write speeds in excess of 4.5gb's , so as you can imagine, rendering times are dramatically reduced.
First of, you will need the software...
I have the paid version, and the free one i think allows up to 4gb disk.
Download from here....http://www.gilisoft.com/product-ramdisk.htm
once installed, head on over to the install dir. (usually located here... ''C:\Program Files (x86)\Gilisoft\RAMDisk'')
and right click ''Ramdisk.exe'' and select properties.
Then, if it isn't already highlighted. check ''Run as admin'' under the compatibility tab.
Then go ahead and open it, select ''create a new RAMDisk an......'' and click next.
once at the creation screen, select your file system (i use fat 32 as its very stable with ramdisk), followed by drive letter and size you want your drive. (remember that the drive decimal size is in binary. eg - 8gb = 8192) then click next.
it will ask you to choose a file location to save the drive image. once done. select ''complete'' and after a moment, your ram disk is set up.
note;- go into your settings and select to load and save .img on boot up and shutdown. otherwise, anything you install on this drive will be lost as Ram is volatile, and if there is any power loss with out a backup, it will be wiped.
The more memory you have, the larger the installs can be. eg:- if you have 128gb of memory, and you have a 100gb ramdisk, you can install large games such as gtav, tomb raider, and such. then, the only bottleneck will be either your cpu or gpu. but as stated, i use it specifically for adobe products, Premiere, audition, after effect and Photoshop. to increase render times.
I hope this was a helpful guide.
I am not sure about linux or mac installs. but it works on recent windows os's.
Download crystalDISKMark - https://crystalmark.info/download/index-e.html and benchmark for yourself.
Thank you for reading.
Tech Mojo.