It's much faster than a harddisk, so any application that does alot of writing/reading (temp files for example) operates much faster when using a ramdrive to store these temp files on. In my case, i use it for Newsleecher (NewsLeecher is a tool made for fetching and managing articles from the Usenet). While downloading it writes all the temp files (50MB) to my ramdisk, and after that it writes the total file to the output directory on my harddisk. So instead of first writing the temp files to my harddisk, and then writing the total result to my harddisk, when using a ramdisk it only writes the total result... = faster and less burden/load on my harddrive :-)