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Ram disks can be software and use set aside blocks of system ram, or they can be hardware based. The ones I used were just little plastic things that plugged into the IDE cables.
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Ram disks are portions of your RAM that are set aside as virtual HDD space. what you are describing sounds like a FLASH disk, which would be non-volotile and orders of magnitude slower.
RAM disks are more or less obsolete due to modern memory management practices. it used to be that you could make things run uber-fast by putting the program on a RAM disk instead of your hard drive, and taking advantage of the higher speed of the memory and of the faster bus that the SIMM / DIMM banks were on.
These days, computers have such stupidly large quantities of memory, and OS memory management routines are so advanced, you will generally be slowing yourself down by second-guessing your system and trying to force software to run on a ram disk.
There are, however, solid state FLASH based hard disks with no moving parts in them. these are crazy fast, and models exist for both SCSI-3, Fibrechannel, and IDE. now if you just had a massive SAN filled with them...