RAM disk, this is a disk based on RAM memory chips. This kind of disk is not able to retain data after the power is turned off (unless a supporting battery is used), but has an exceptionally high read/write speed (especially for random access) and an unlimited lifespan. It is important in tasks that need a lot of cycles to write over information, even professional SSD drives don’t live long. To the operating system the RAM disk is indistinguishable from an SSD or HDD disk and no special drivers or setup is required. Unlike a disk that is virtually located in the computer’s RAM memory, where the maximum memory capacity is limited to 128-256 GB in the best consumer motherboards, a RAM disk for a PCIe slot, in general, has no volume limits and can work in any MB with a PCIe slot.

Here is a bit refreshed translation of my 2015 blog post. The post shows how to organize a personal academic library of unlimited size for free. This is a funny case of a self written manual which I came back to multiple times myself and many many more times referred my friends to it, even non-Russian speakers who had to use Google Translator and infer the rest from screenshots. Finally, I decided to translate it adding some basic information on how to use Zotero with rmarkdown.

A brief (and hopefully unnecessary for you) intro of bibliographic managers

Bibliographic manager is a life saver in everyday academic life. I suffer almost physical pain just thinking about colleagues who for some reason never started using one — all those excel spreadsheets with favorite citations, messy folders with PDFs, constant hours lost for the joy-killing task of manual reference list formatting. Once you start using a reference manager this all becomes a happily forgotten nightmare.