A RAM disk acts as a virtual drive on your system. It allows you to create directories, copy files to and from it, etc…. The data however is not written onto a hard disk, but remains purely stored into a particular part of the RAM memory. Hard disks have mechanical parts that are needed to seek to a particular position on the magnetic storage media and to read/write data. This makes them relative lazy. A RAM disk does not need to seek , and by this , it can read and write the same data to upon 30-60 times faster than a hard disk ! However, the data stored in RAM is “volatile” : it disappears when you cut off the power to the RAM memory, in other words, if you turn off your system. This applies to the content of the RAM disk too !

A ramdisk can perfectly be used to store :

• web content of web servers.
• temporary index files and tables of database servers ( MS-SQL-Server , MySQL , …).
• temporary files ( TEMP and TMP environment variable ) and “Temporary Internet Files”.
• the scratch disk for Adobe (R) Photoshop (R).
• games and installed programs. The startup times of programs may decrease drastically !
• audio and video capture / editing.
• creation and playback of slide shows.
• data that has to be written to CD , to prevent underrun during the burn process.
• as storage of the “ReadyBoost” cache on Vista.
• all kinds of data that may be lost ( or MUST be lost for security reasons ) at shutdown.

From privacy point of view, RAM disk is also a working drive for decrypted version of encrypted document, as all trace of the data will be wiped and deleted once power off.