big ramdrives - make clipper fly 1

[SM777]

For years I have used ramdrives for holding temporary dbfs and creating indexes. It was not easy to find any that could go above 32Mb.

For a while now I have used XMSDSK to create a half gig ramdrive and that really flies.

When processing my dbf files I copy the files to the ramdrive, do the processing then copy back down to the hard disk. Ok, you run a risk of a powercut corrupting the file, but then you will only be corrupting the ramdrive file and your hard disk copy is intact.

locate XMSDSK in a search engine

you may need to modify Config.sys to add device=c:\windows\emm386.exe noems

add

xmsdsk 64000 E: /C1 /T /Y

in autoexec.bat

the 64000 is a 64Mb size, E: the drive letter, I forget the other switches!

This method is great for creating indexes. Just change your index .... to e:\tempindx and then when the index is complete close it and do a !copy e:\tempindx.ndx yourindexlocation\indexname.ndx

I've only used in 95 and 98 (not ME). Its saves me thousands of hours a year when I'm processing halfgig databases.

 

[Guest_imported]

interesting but you fail to realize that you can use ramdrive.sys (sometimes ramdisk.sys)

 

[ccc555]

Thanks for sharing this information, really helps when debugging programs, saves up to half the time.

 

[SM777]

ramdrive.sys has a limit of 32Mb