Running Mint/Ubuntu from RamDrive

Hi Guys,

I have recently purchased my vertex 4 SSD and will be installing over the weekend. However, last weekend while configuring the partitions again with Parted Magic live CD it dawned on me that why not just run the system from a RAM drive, that will be waayyy faster than any SSD in most cases for the system partition, you just need to make sure that the system write items like config changes/updates back on the real/image file system?

Thus in short: what I propose is to have an image of your system available on small SSD/USB3 Thumb drive, and during the boot process, a Ramdrive will be created and the system will be operated from there, with all your data on normal hard drives. If config (Preferences/customisations) are made, they should be copied to the image at the earliest opportunity (manual script, script on shut down but ideally as part of the system)

This should finally make use of the unused ram, I have 16GB but only 1Gb is being used by the system....


Googling did not make me any wiser? Any thoughts, pointers or suggestions?

I've had the same thought many times. Short answer: Not doable easily

Let us know if you find anything out - Closest I've come is to run a Virtual Machine from my RAMdrive. Was blindingly fast, but otherwise not particularly useful

It is quite doable and I dabbled with it years ago, but at that time RAM was expensive and you were limited by motherboards that could only handle 2GB. Here is how to go about it.:

http://reboot.pro/14547/

Very doable. The downside side is it takes some time to load everything to ram & there are some things you don't want in ram.

Have a look at the Archbang iso which has (or had) the option to load the OS to a ram drive.