Yes them numbers are real, and no this is not what you would consider a typical storage device. This is a benchmark results of using a program called RAMDisk, in case you don't know what it is, it will take a portion of your memory and turn it into a storage device.
Ramdisk's arent really anything new. I remember having one on my old commodore 64 way back. They are great for some things, but be extremely careful that anything that gets written/saved to the ram disk that you need long term is written back to the physical HD. Ram disk's are really common in server environments, web servers tend to load the pages so they are quicker to read and most databases load as much as possible into ram which is effectively the same thing.
There are a few packages for windows that will (at boot) create a ram disk and load an image into ram automatically. It will then monitor for changes and automatically write back to the drives so you dont lose (much) data in the event of a power outage. Nice when you run the same few things all the time and can load them into ram, but not very helpful when you dont.
For those that arent familiar with ram disk's already, be careful using them and learn a bit first. Ram is not static and will wipe when power is removed.
Edit: as an additional note, the new LR server will run/rely heavily on ram disks whenever I finally finish setting it up. One of the things that will hopefully help the site load much faster in the near future.
I like ramdisk ability of using it for temp files, and setting up my programs to use it for caching, like Corel Paint Shop pro X4 or Photo Paint x5. I just got board last night and figured why not lets see how fast it is. For those who don't have a SSD can use RAMDisk as a ready boost, which helps out a bit on computers. I use RAMDisk as a ready boost on my laptop. Yes you don't want to install anything to the RAMDisk. If you are using RAMDisk as a temp folder, and a program requires a reboot to install properly then it will never complete because as soon as the computer reboots it clears the temp folder. But I feel it is a small price to pay to gain a bit more speed out of the machine. The only true downside to RAMDisk is the shutdown and start up are a bit longer, but if you dont shut your computer off very often then you can live with it.
