A RAMDisk 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 your RAM memory. Hard disks have mechanical parts that allow to seek to a particular position on the magnetic storage media and to read/write data. This makes them relative lazy. A RAMDisk can read and write the same data to upon 30-60 times faster than a hard disk ! However, the data stored in your 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 RAMDisk too !

A ramdisk can perfectly be used to store :

- web content of web servers
- temporary index files and tables of database servers
- temporary files ( TEMP and TMP environment variable ) and "Temporary Internet Files"
- the scratch disk for Adobe (R) Photoshop (R)
- games and programs in general (1), reloading parts and data occurs many times faster
- MPEG audio ( MP3 ) and video capture / editing
- creation and playback of slide shows
- all kinds of data that may be lost ( or MUST be lost for security reasons ) at shutdown

(1) The installed software can be reloaded automatically at boot time by means of, for example, a backup program.

These are only a few examples. There will certainly be many more tasks for which a ramdisk can be used, depending on people's "inventivity" .