SuperSpeed 8.0 RAM Disk Plus
If you’re reasonably new to Windows, you’ll probably have no idea what a RAM disk is, or why you’d want one. The RAM disk driver, once a standard component of Windows, disappeared from Windows XP and hasn’t been heard from since.
In fact, RAM disks are extremely useful. A RAM disk borrows some system memory and creates a synthetic hard drive with it, which appears as a drive letter on your system just like a real hard drive. It works like a real hard drive, too, except that everything stored on it vanishes as soon as your computer is powered down.
A RAM disk is a very handy place to store transitory files, especially on a network. There’s no need to clean them up, as they blow themselves away at the end of the day.
The SuperSpeed RAM disk is one of several third-party replacement RAM disk systems for Windows XP. It’s very much the RAM disk we would have written, had we not been able to buy one – with one catch. It’s a substantial catch, however.
We’ve been using the SuperSpeed RAM disk for almost a year as of this writing, and it’s proven to be remarkably stable. System software should be eminently forgettable, and this product is as forgettable as one could ask. It does what it says on the box, with no user interaction.
Unlike the original Microsoft RAM disk from earlier versions of Windows, the SuperSpeed RAM disk can have its size adjusted without rebooting Windows. This is slick, although we’ve never had recourse to do so. It can create multiple RAM disks with multiple drive letters, which might be handy for networks accessed by lots of users with varying degrees of trustworthiness. Again, we’ve never used it. Finally, it can be configured to write its RAM disk contents to a temporary hard drive file and restore them when its host system boots up – an interesting option, but it would largely defeat the purpose of a RAM disk for our application.
The catch in the SuperSpeed RAM disk is its over-paranoid licensing procedure. It’s activated with a complex numerical key – much like Alchemy Mindworks’ applications – but this key appears to include a reference to its host system. If you have to reinstall Windows or you change computers, and hence need to reinstall the Superspeed RAM disk, you’ll need a new key.
We’ve done so once, and the support staff at Superspeed provided us with a new key at no cost, reasonably quickly. None the less, had we been aware of this issue when we were initially looking at the Superspeed product, we would have looked elsewhere. Reinstalling Windows and rebuilding a large system is sufficiently complex without having to chase new registration keys, rather than just recovering them from a local record – this is a hoop no one should have to jump through.
