Ramdisks - anyone using them for Games??

[GaryRW]

I noticed yesterday that ram is ridiculously cheap and you can get 8GB for ~£35. So that got me thinking back to the old days when I upgraded my Acorn A3000 to a whopping 4 MB . Then I started thinking about how I used part of that 4MB as a ramdisk for games. So.....

Is anyone using one of the various software options for creating a ramdisk? (there's a list and some benches here: http://www.raymond.cc/blog/12-ram-di...d-write-speed/). I figure that an extra 8GB could easily fit my skyrim installation and with a couple of quick junction points/symbolic links pointing in the direction of the ramdisk, I could run skyrim and have save games all on the ramdisk

I'm running an SSD, so I do wonder whether there is any real point to this. obviously it would need to all be copied to the ram disk once every boot cycle + back ups inbetween, but I leave my main pc in sleep mode pretty much all the time anyway, so don't see that as a major hassle.

If anyone is doing this, any recommendations for the best software to do it? I can't find a freeware or trial that can cope with >4GB files so unless I ran 2 different programs and set up lots of junction points to split the SKyrim folder across 2x4gb ramdisks, I won't know whether there is any real benefit to this until after I've (a) shelled out for the ram and (b) paid for the software too.

Are there Hexus geeks out there doing this

[Agent]

Ahh, it's so nice to see another RISC OS user who thinks along the same lines as me

I've tried - yes, namely with Unreal Engine based games, Eve and a few others though are also on that list.

Sadly, there is practically no difference to my SSD speed. I've not really looked into it, but I suspect I'm bottlenecked by something else in the system rather than the SSD/Ramdisk.
This worked quite well, and allows you to save the Ramdisk to disk if you have the paid version.

If you try this though you have to name the disk '!Ramdisk' or '!Scrap' to keep with the old naming standards

[shaithis]

Used to use them on the amiga and then in the dos days

The main use I could see for one these days is just as protection for your SSDs longevity. Moving your temp folder or your swapfile there could potentially add a fair amount of life to an SSD, depending on usage.

[Agent]

From the tests I've seen on SSD life (both Sandforce and Intels), the amount of data you need to write to them to get them into trouble is astronomical for a home user. Under normal use, even with temp folders, there is just no need to worry about moving them to a Ramdrive / HDD.

Unless of course, someone wants to correct this

[GaryRW]

If you try this though you have to name the disk '!Ramdisk' or '!Scrap' to keep with the old naming standards

Genuine laugh on that one.

After I posted I tried just moving the saves file to a ramdisk and was disappointed to find it still pausing when I hit quicksave. I'd hoped it was still for some reason using the main skyrim folder or pausing for some other reason, but then why would it? So not that surprised to hear you say it doesn't make much difference.

Shame - I was getting so nostalgic about ramdisks.

(only semi serious at his point: what can you do with an extra 8GB that's useful?)

[smargh]

I used to run my Firefox profile, FeedDemon and a few other things from a ramdisk. It was *very* fast, especially when searching Firefox history for long-forgotten URLs.

I think I stopped using it to diagnose infrequent BSODs and never bothered setting it up again - SSD is fine, and FeedDemon has improved its cache management a bit.

[spoon_]

Oooh good old Amiga days, Workbench 1.x and up had RAMDisk by default like 20 years ago ^^

[jim]

From the tests I've seen on SSD life (both Sandforce and Intels), the amount of data you need to write to them to get them into trouble is astronomical for a home user. Under normal use, even with temp folders, there is just no need to worry about moving them to a Ramdrive / HDD.

Unless of course, someone wants to correct this

Yeah, it's a ridiculously overstated problem... especially given how fickle hard disks are.

As for the OP, I doubt it's going to make any noticeable difference. Hard Disk to SSD makes a reasonable difference, so it might cut load times in half, but from SSD to RAM? Not going to be nearly the same.

It's all about optimisation. I've been playing Empire Total War recently, and it's very sluggish and much slower to load anything than Napoleon Total War, even though both are run off an SSD.

[GaryRW]

thanks all.

Still tempted to get the 8GB even if it just sits there doing nothing for 99.9% of the time. I know that at some point I'll need some ram probably for another machine and kick myself when the price is x2 or x3 what it is at the moment

[pauleden]

The main use I could see for one these days is just as protection for your SSDs longevity. Moving your temp folder or your swapfile there could potentially add a fair amount of life to an SSD, depending on usage.

I give 8 of my 16GB over to a RAMDISK and it's full of pagefile. Not to save writes on my SSD, but to save some space on it. Even when you're careful, it's easy to fill up an Intel 80GB drive.

[Terbinator]

I'd be interested in BF3 results as that does see a noticeable difference between SSD/HDD - the benefits would be slightly mitigated by the fact there is a start timer in game though

[jim]

I'm managing to fill all 8GB of RAM on my new machine - admittedly a lot of that is cached rather than actually used, but I'm genuinely filling it.

Does anyone have and use more than 8GB on a Windows 7 machine? I'd be interested to know how much a Windows 7 machine will cache given the chance. I know you can use it up with samples and so on if you have very particular uses for the RAM, but what about fairly ordinary usage with a few applications running in parallel?

[Terbinator]

I'm managing to fill all 8GB of RAM on my new machine - admittedly a lot of that is cached rather than actually used, but I'm genuinely filling it.

Does anyone have and use more than 8GB on a Windows 7 machine? I'd be interested to know how much a Windows 7 machine will cache given the chance. I know you can use it up with samples and so on if you have very particular uses for the RAM, but what about fairly ordinary usage with a few applications running in parallel?

With only Chrome open (outside of my various driver panels in the taskbar etc) I'm using 3GB and have 196MB "free".

[jim]

With only Chrome open (outside of my various driver panels in the taskbar etc) I'm using 3GB and have 196MB "free".

Presumably most of that is cached though?

[Terbinator]

Presumably most of that is cached though?

Yeah.

[kalniel]

I'm managing to fill all 8GB of RAM on my new machine - admittedly a lot of that is cached rather than actually used, but I'm genuinely filling it.

Does anyone have and use more than 8GB on a Windows 7 machine? I'd be interested to know how much a Windows 7 machine will cache given the chance. I know you can use it up with samples and so on if you have very particular uses for the RAM, but what about fairly ordinary usage with a few applications running in parallel?

Before I load any big application, Windows 7 generally only caches about up to about 4GB total RAM usage for me, out of 12GB. After a big application has loaded (and exited) more remains in cache.