gHacks technology news » ramdisk http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Use a Ramdisk to increase Firefox security http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/14/use-a-ramdisk-to-increase-firefox-security/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/14/use-a-ramdisk-to-increase-firefox-security/#comments Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:38:03 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/14/use-a-ramdisk-to-increase-firefox-security/ If you choose to delete the cache whenever Firefox exits it’s gone, right ? Wrong ! Sure, it got deleted from the hard disk but every file recovery utility, like Recuva, will be able to restore the deleted cache which means that everyone may take a look at each and every website that you visited during your last browsing session.

You could run a free disk space wiper like Eraser every time you close Firefox but that is not very practicable. A far better solution that would also speed up your browsing experience is to use a Ramdisk to store the Firefox cache. Ramdisks, I hear you moan already that they are a relict of the past and not useful anymore. Wrong again..

Ramdisks make sense in many situations, especially if you have enough RAM so that the Ramdisk gets a decent amount of it. As a quick explanation, a Ramdisk is a temporary disk in your RAM. It has a drive letter and behaves like any hard drive or USB device that is connected to your computer.

The benefit is that it is faster than a hard drive because RAM is faster than hard drives and that everything that gets written to it will be gone once you restart the computer.

I’m going to explain how to create a Ramdisk and set the directory of the Firefox cache to it to increase security and speed. First, download the file Ramdisk.sys and extract it to your computer. Start the application ramdisk.exe afterwards.

create a ramdisk

Click on the left button Install Ramdisk and wait a few seconds. All other options should become active afterwards. Begin by selecting a size (of your RAM) for the Ramdisk. I would not use more than 50% of your RAM for the Ramdisk, I’m using 25% which translates to 512 Megabytes of RAM for the Ramdisk.

Select a drive letter afterwards, pick one from the end to avoid conflicts. Keep the Fixed Media Entry and click on OK. This should initialize the Ramdisk. Check to see if the new drive letter is available in My Computer.

Now open Firefox and enter about:config in the address bar. Filter for the string browser.cache.disk.parent_directory. If it is not found create it by right-clicking the empty space and selecting New > String from the menu. Paste the above string into the form and enter the value driveletter:\\directory.

My Ramdisk has been created with the drive letter Z:\ which means that I used the value z:\\temp\\ for the Firefox cache. Please note that you have to use double “\\” and not single “\”.

Restart Firefox after creating the new entry and visit some websites. Now head over to your Ramdisk and check if the cache is filling with the files of those websites. If you followed this instruction it should. The cache will be deleted once you reboot or shut down your system.

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/14/use-a-ramdisk-to-increase-firefox-security/feed/ 17 Use a Ramdisk to speed up Applications http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/18/use-a-ramdisk-to-speed-up-applications/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/18/use-a-ramdisk-to-speed-up-applications/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2007 17:24:50 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/04/18/use-a-ramdisk-to-speed-up-applications/ Many modern computers have one, two or even more gigabytes of ram that can be put to good use by creating a Ramdisk that is a virtual drive that uses part of the computers ram. The Ramdisk can be used like every other hard drive, you can copy applications and files to it and start them from there if they allow that. It is for instance possible to move portable applications like Firefox, Thunderbird or Audacity into the Ramdisk and use the advantage that those applications are actually residing in memory which speeds up loading times a lot.

One convenient way to setup a Ramdisk is to use the software AR Ramdisk which is easy to setup and work with. Just install AR Ramdisk as usual and start configuring the settings afterwards. Assign a drive letter to the Ramdisk and choose a size for it. I would not suggest to select more than a quarter of your Ram but you can experiment with the settings if you like. Leave everything as is and restart your computer afterwards. You should see a new drive letter after the restart, now copy files or applications to the Ramdisk and start them from there.

You will see a noticeable speed increase when running applications from the Ramdisk. A good website to get some portable applications is the portable apps website which has downloads for programs like Firefox, Thunderbird and many others.

It is also possible to use the Ramdisk for the temp files of Windows. To do that you need to move the Temp directory from the default location to the Ramdisk. To change the default location go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced -> Environment Variables and change the Windows temp dir to the Ramdisk.

It should be noted that all data that is in the Ramdisk will be lost if you restart the computer. Remember that the files reside in system Ram. This is great for temp files which means that you do not have to delete the temp files by yourself. It could also be used to set the disk cache of Firefox to the Ramdisk which would mean that it would be automatically cleared during shutdown.

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