Is it possible to persuade software to use RAM instead of hard drive?

Question

I have 16GB in my iMac and also in my MacBook Pro, the only times I see it really being used is when I run virtual machines that forcibly grab 2GB or whatever, that I have told them to grab.  Most programs tend to run with just their own code in memory, the video files or image files seems to be streamed from the hard drive, even when I have easily enough RAM for it all to fit uncompressed.
I appreciate this may be down to the way those programs have been coded, I have checked preferences in one of them and found nothing about how to handle the data or memory.  Perhaps a good old-fashioned RAM Disk could be used?  Is there such a feature in Lion or Mountain Lion, or a 3rd party application to do this?  I just would like to speed up video editing and photo editing tasks, which appear to always make use of the hard drive.  Surely these tasks would run faster in RAM.

Answer 1

Video and photo editing apps tend to swap around and build up files between the applications and the hard drive.
And, yes, this the way it is supposed to work! There is nooo way to circumvent this.
Photo editing aps, like Photoshop for example, created a working file that is three to four times larger than the original image and can get appreciably larger than this as you do complex work on an image.
The same is true with video content. With video, you are working with large files and clips and using complex editing and effects on video. The size of these types of files can grow appreciably, also.
These sort of apps are very CPU, GPU, RAM and hard drive intensive applications.
It maybe that you do not have suffucient internal hard drive space left for working on these type of files in these applications.
How much internal hd space do you have remaining on your iMac's internal drive?
You may have to looking into using a much larger external FireWire 809 drive for doing your video and photo editing work.
Also,,if your video work is that intense, if you have a 2010 or newer iMac, you can install up to 32 GBs of RAM.
The 16 GBs of RAM you have now may not be enough to handle the complexity of the video projects you are working on.
It's probably fine for photo editing, though.
Another option, if your iMac is out of warranty, is to bit the bullet and have installed by Apple certified center, the largest Solid State Drive (SSD) you can afford to add an additonal faster boot drive to your iMac.
These SSD's don't come in really large storage sizes, yet, (you would still need to supplement storage with an external larger drive), but since SSDs contain no moving parts, the system and applications would run much snappier.