Create your own RAM Disk in OS X

RAM as you already know is the random access memory where a certain amount of data is stored that be residents in the same we can have them ready much earlier than if you had to read them from a traditional hard drive obviously, but the problem is that when there is a loss of power, this data disappears, either due to a power outage, a restart ...

In any case, it is an advantage to have more space where other programs like Photoshop can take advantage of it or to edit large video files so for a test server it can be a more than interesting option.

In particular, the RAMDisk does not provide a clear advantage over the RAM other than for store at any given time what we want, It is a way to configure a new storage device, as if we installed another hard disk that we will see with the finder, with the exception that the read / write speed will be overwhelming depending on the speed of the installed RAM if we compare it with an HDD traditional or even an SSD. Its usefulness does not go beyond what we want to give it, such as configuring the cache of a server in tests, as I have said before.

Through Terminal

The only thing to keep in mind when creating it is the appropriate size to allocate, keeping in mind the amount of RAM that we have since if we go over that amount, what can happen is that the system has to use the disk as an alternative, causing the waiting times when opening applications or loading files to increase exponentially, that is, the overall performance of the system will plummet.

The first method to create our RAMDisk is through the system terminal. With what we will open Applications> Utilities> terminal and we will introduce this command:

diskutil erasevolume HFS + 'RAMDisk' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram: // XXXXX`

Instead of XXXX we will write the amount to assign always is the Multiplication of Megabytes by 2048, so if we want 8Gb of RAM, we simply multiply (8192 * 2048) and it will give us an amount of 16777216 with what would be like this:

diskutil erasevolume HFS + 'RAMDisk' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram: // 16777216`

Also if you wish you can change the name of RAMDisk between the quotation marks for the one you want.

Through a Program 

If that of touching the terminal and inserting commands gives you «yuyu», the best thing is that you leave the task to a program that does exactly the same automatically without you having to intervene, this program is called RAMDiskCreator and we will only have to put the amount of storage in the box, nothing more.

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