Ramdisk

Post by **Rasputin** » Tue Oct 18, 2011 9:13 am

I recently bought 24Gigs of RAM from the Shiny Badge Collector and a friend suggested using <a href="http://members.fortunecity.com/ramdisk/ ... amdriv.htm" target="_blank">RAMDisk </a> to save SSD writes and to lower load times for appilcations.

Basically RAMdisk partitions off a section of your RAM and displays this as a normal Harddisk as far as Windows is concerned. This allows you to change the Temp folder in Windows to point towards the RAMDisk lowering the amount of writes to the SSD drive. Also loading files from RAM to RAM is almost instantaneous so it lowers game loading times.

Now with BFBC2 or any other game all you need to do is move the game to the RAMDisk and click play and you will get straight into the game and not have to wait for the map to load. To do this if you look on line for steam mover and use this to copy the game files across to RAMDisk and thats it. I have tried it with a couple of games now and even the Total war games which normally take an age to load are super fast.

Caveat lector, that if you turn the power off you will lose all the files stored in the RAMdisk. So if your Windows Crashes, everything will be lost so back up the game files, once you finish playing copy the game files back to the Steam directory for safe keeping.

Post by **Claw** » Tue Oct 18, 2011 1:04 pm

There's nothing new about this method, we were doing this sort of thing decades ago.

Besides the novelty of saying you can do it, there is little value in the return when you consider all that is involved in the weight of data, configuring and copying stuff over, etc. If it moves away from third party and is an integrated feature of Windows, or the BIOS in some way, then there would be real value to it.

Post by **Hammer** » Tue Oct 18, 2011 1:22 pm

Glad to see you've got it all up and running Ras. BF3 could use this as I'm sure it will have a lot more data to load for the maps than BFBC2.

Post by **Trig** » Tue Oct 18, 2011 1:46 pm

I've only got 8Gb in mine, with 3 SSD's am I gonna see that much difference if I bang some more RAM in and RAMDisk it?

Post by **Rasputin** » Tue Oct 18, 2011 2:11 pm

Claw wrote: There's nothing new about this method, we were doing this sort of thing decades ago.

Besides the novelty of saying you can do it, there is little value in the return when you consider all that is involved in the weight of data, configuring and copying stuff over, etc. If it moves away from third party and is an integrated feature of Windows, or the BIOS in some way, then there would be real value to it.

TBH claw, it took 5 mins to set up including a restart and less than a minute to copy to RAM. In the likes of BFBC2 I understand what you are saying with no real value due to the timer before the round starts but before I upgraded by Rig I was always one of the last in the game on a map change. If I had known about this I would have been waiting for the timer to count down and joining the round first. Other games like the total war games do take ages as did BF2 to load maps, with RAMDisk it would mean more time playing and less waiting.

@ Trig Well 8Gb of RAm is cheaper than an SSD at the moment and the transfer rates from RAM to RAM are somewhere in the region of 80Gbps so I think that you would.

@ Hammer, Hell yeah loving it.

Post by **Trig** » Tue Oct 18, 2011 2:31 pm

Might give that a go then

Post by **Rasputin** » Wed Oct 19, 2011 10:51 am

<a href="http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Componen ... ctId=46920" target="_blank">8 GB of decent RAM for Â£29.99 </a> If you are interested.

Post by **Trig** » Wed Oct 19, 2011 11:59 am

I'll check whats in there and then just get some of the say...