Don't just give your disk images/ISO's drive letters, RAM disk'em too...

addictive tips - Mount Disk Images To RAM For High Speed Disk Access With OSFMount

"Many free disc mounting programs provide multitude of options for mounting and managing disc images. Many of these programs have quite similar features and it is not often that one comes across a software that can take the edge from its competitors by providing a unique feature. OSFMount is an application that allows mounting disc images on not just virtual drives but also into the RAM. This means that you can get faster access to disc images and improve the overall performance of the mounted images. This may include disc images of operating systems (for virtual machines) or games, that can be run more efficiently by mounting them in the RAM rather than on local disks.

Creating RAM disks can be particularly handy for IT professional such as the ones who may require running database applications. OSFMount supports a huge array of extensions, including, ISO, BIN, IMG, DD, 00N, NRG (Nero Burning ROM image), SDI (System Deployment Image), AFF / AFM / AFD (Advanced Forensic Format images) and VMDK (VMWare image).

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PassMark Software - OSFMount

"OSFMount allows you to mount local disk image files (bit-for-bit copies of a disk partition) in Windows with a drive letter. You can then analyze the disk image file with PassMark OSForensics™ by using the mounted volume's drive letter. By default, the image files are mounted as read only so that the original image files are not altered.

OSFMount also supports the creation of RAM disks, basically a disk mounted into RAM. This generally has a large speed benefit over using a hard disk. As such this is useful with applications requiring high speed disk access, such a database applications, games (such as game cache files) and browsers (cache files). A second benefit is security, as the disk contents are not stored on a physical hard disk (but rather in RAM) and on system shutdown the disk contents are not persistent.

OSFMount supports mounting images of CDs, which can be useful when a particular CD is used often and the speed of access is important.

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This is one of those "Damn but that makes allot of sense" utilities. With the rise of x64 Windows OS's, RAM is no longer the restraint it used to be. Also given the popularity of using ISO images to distribute software, marrying up ISO mounting with RAM disk functionality just makes sense. 

This also looks like a nice EDD/ESI/eDiscovery tool given that you can mount the images read-only and it supports a number of formats used in the eDiscovery biz (like DD/AFF/etc)

 

LOL... My title for this post was going to be "Don't just mount your ISO's, RAM'em" but had second thoughts... :|