Let's talk about RAMdisk +

I did a search of the forums for talk on RAMdisk/RAMdisk Plus after reading about it from a helpful soul who posted a link to it, and realized there wasn't much on it I didn't know. What concerned me was the lack of interest in it, and this peaked my curiosity unto the subject as if I'm missing something, so please indulge me if I am grabbing at nothing here...

I know as technology increases exponentially, especially for Clevos/rebrands, the notebook mobo's will be able to support 8gb-16gb of RAM.

Note: Do not comment here if you're just going to insert a snide "do you really NEED more than 4GB of RAM?!!" comment. This thread is for speed-freaks and the ideal scenario is faster is better. And for the record, I have been known to do some photo editing and running apps while gaming, and find myself near the 3GB threshold (32 bit limitations/1GB to my graphics) all too often.

If you do not know how RAMdisk works, basically it creates a virtual drive out of excess RAM. This is sweet - the more RAM you have - for your IE/Firefox cache folder and other frequently-used apps. Reading from RAM is ridiculously fast compared to HDD access time. My thinking on this last night extrapolated to sticking games on RAMdisks and how much quicker that could be than SSD SLC technology. I cannot find much info on doing this, however, anywhere on the net. This might help the crisis associated with low 30's and even 20's frames-per-second us XPS users have with games like Crysis whose computers might be maxxed out and running at 1920 x 1200 but still can't get very smooth frames especially during the hectic alien battle scenes.


My objective is to get more RAM and use RAMdisk Plus 9.0 (does anyone know if there is a better app out there? I couldn't find too many similar options) because it supports multiple drives and can save/backup information on the drive, which is helpful because as you know, RAM is cleared upon boot, thereby defeating its purpose as a jury-rigged harddrive, if you want to use it to speed up apps and NOT just your cache folder, which I can see the advantage to deleting every time the computer is restarted.

I wish 4GB sticks of RAM would drop in price quicker.

 

ramdisk won't help on games except for load times. and you don't want to have anything non-temporary on a ramdisk. even while the ramdisk may support it, it will a) defeat one of its performance gains, and b) will still not be good on a system crash.

to a) your ramdisk has to be read from disk first, and written to disk last. that'll shift your hd work, but not remove it. so what you gain at app load time you lose at boot time.

to b) i don't have any need to say anything.

get more ram, and get vista 64bit and you don't have any of those hassles. you can then still create ramdisks for old 32bit apps that flood your temporary folder as they can't use that much ram. but it'll still be much more performant in general case.

and for the rest: a faster hard drive.

and, just for info: i am a user of a ramdisk. i use it at work for ie and other temps, my hd is really slow and i hate the fragmentation of the temporary files.

i don't use one at home as it never was worth the hassle. vista 32 or 64 have much less fragmentation issues, and now with ssd's i don't care about ram at all anymore

what is interesting, though, is the option of some ramdisks, is to allocate the unused ram in a 32bit environment. i have to try that out once for curiosity.

oh, and be aware that your system may not support more than 4gb ram.

 

I am not sure if their is a product called the Ramdisc+, but I know of a ramdisc.
Research the Gigabyte I-RAM.
It is a ramdisc which uses four standard PC3200 memory cards.
Basically what it is, is a virtual disc. The data is stored on the memory cards, and the memory cards are connected to the motherboard via a SATA cable. The PCI card powers the card.
Ramdisc were popular about 5 years ago before SSD's were heard from (on the public end)
The ramdisc allowed instant boot times, but the problem was the memory technology wasnt there. They used standard computer memory, which has no real "memory retention"
I mean when the power goes away everything is lost. So Gigabyte technologies mounted a battery on the pci card so that the memory could retain the information for about 15 hours while the system was off.
Now personally seeing one of these things work , you would be amazed. Their is no seek time with memory. hdtune reads 0.0ms.
The card maxxes out the SATA bus of 150mb/sec and is continuous all of the way through. They can be run in raid 0, for more capacity, and I have seen videos of people having 4 of them in raid 0, getting over 500mb/sec of data transfer.
These things load fast. I mean fast. From after the bios loads, it takes about 3-4 seconds for XP to fully boot. It is by far the fastest technology for loading software, but it is not very reliable, since it relies completely on a continuous power source.

Ramdisc's like the I-RAM seem to be different from what you are talking about. The ramdisc you are talking about seems like software, so it is probably trying to imitate the I-RAM via software use of free memory.

K-TRON

 

what he talks about is software, yes. it installs a virtual disk into ram that you may use to target your temp folders towards.

i-Ram is a real disk, like hdds and ssds. if they continued development i'd use one now. 300MB/s rw on s-ata2, instant access times, and support for as much memory as you can plug in. or even over pcie directly, resulting in even faster speeds.

but sadly, i-Ram died. and hyperdrive is not only expensive, but not really fast eighter. hyperdrive is similar to i-Ram but in a 5.25" package.

with todays ram prices it would be a real option, if the hw without ram would be cheap. (and with battery backup + backup to disk when on battery, like hyperdrive does).

what he talks about is completely different. it's interesting but not for general usage.

 

Ok, so the OP wants to use RAMDisk 9.0 to create multiple RAMDisk drives, and use them to store the pagefile, and cache for other apps....
So ?

 

ramdisk for pagefile == most stupid idea ever. better use the ram for ram instead.

then again, if the ramdisk can allocate memory beyond the reach of xp32bit, and the bios supports it, it may have uses. still, getting vista64 instead would be a much more useful way to manage and use the ram. and more future proof.

 

I didn't get the point, of this thread ?

Basically, if you have 4GB installed, and XPSs usually recognise around 3.5GB with a 32-bit OS, one can limit the addressed RAM to 3GB and use the rest of the 1GB to store the pagefile, so in a way the user is using the whole 4GB, because the RAMdisk will offer almost the same performance as the physical memory itself.

 

Uh? If you're a performance freak then just get a 64 bit OS. Work arounds aren't the way to do it. I'm all for tons of memory, but I'm also all for proper implementation. RAMDisk is cool regardless, but seriously, 64 bit is superior - why wouldn't you just install a 64 bit system?

 

well if your os can only use 3.5gb of your 4gb of ram in your system, and a ramdisk can allocate a virtual disk on the other half gb, you have no half gb lost.

that's his though. extending this to 8gb with a 4.5gb ramdisk would mean you would not waste even more memory in 32bit mode.

but yes, just get vista 64 and be done with it

still nice for the occational 32bit platform as an option.

 

he learned vista is evil. you know, from the internets..

 

Well, you can adjust the physical memory and the ramdisk anyway you want, but I remember reading somewhere that the size of the pagefile should be like at least 1x or 1.5x the size of the physical memory.

 

this has nothing to do with the page file AT ALL actually.

 

I'm not using it for the swap file. My original post [that apparently no one read] talks about uses of software RAMdisk 9.0 to create a virtual drive to load games/apps/temp folders on and how it might compare to an SSD in terms of speed. Never mentioned the page file. Using the page file would be self-defeating if you understand what it does.

And thanks to those who assumed I don't want to use Vista because I'm an uninformed idiot reading the 'internets'. My ideal OS is XP Pro 32-bit because 64 bit XP Pro has several problems I have read about driver-wise and compatibility-wise with games. Vista I do not care to upgrade to mainly because XP Pro has better results on my laptop (take a look at the 1730 thread if you think I'm talking out of my butt) with current game releases - benches tend to work towards XP Pro rather than Vista in some of the most recent cases. Maybe you think it's great for your laptop - fine. I think it's too bloated and the gains aren't worthwhile for me to upgrade to. I don't consider DirectX 10 worthwhile. Crysis played just fine running 9.0C on my computer.

Someone (I think Davepermen) mentioned that loading games on RAMDisk would be risky in the event of a crash. RAMDisk + does backup things loaded to the disk, however, and obviously I'd have my own copies of the game files before I stuck them on the virtual disk, so I don't see much substantiation to the claim that it's not worth it. I'm just curious...

I play DOD: Source and Counterstrike: Source. Together, with all the mods and stuff in the game folders, they take up about 12 GB on my HDD currently. I would want to ideally load this folder unto a RAMDisk (which is why I mentioned more than 8 GB of RAM) and all its subfolders because different files get used throughout the game when HL2.exe is loaded, though they may not appear in the Task Manager.

 

In order to load a game from the RAMDisk, you'd have to load it into the RAMDisk.
In order to load the game from the RAMDisk, you'd have to load it from the hard drive. So, you're either loading it from the hard drive and waiting, then loading it instantly to play... or you're leaving the PC on all the time and leaving it loaded into the memory.
If that's the case, you might as well just... again... get a 64 bit OS, and leave the game open all the time. Then all you have to do is maximize it to play it!

 

Okay seriously - no more 64 bit OS posts. They're worthless at this point. I don't have a problem with loading it to the RAMDisk. I do not play the game as soon as the laptop boots - I tend to check mail and peruse a few websites first. Can we stay on the RAMDisk subject for a second here.

 

If you have 8GB RAM I say give it a go. It will just be a pain waiting for the RAMdisk to dump to an image on shutdown and loading it on bootup.

This RAMDisk also has the features you need but like RAMDisk Plus it's not free.

This RAMDisk however is free (Dataram RAMDisk Beta) and it has the features you need.

 

Very cool links. Here's a snippet from the first link you posted:

Ability to load a raw disk image to format and populate the ramdisk at driver initialization ( load speed : ~ 30 sec/GB using an image stored on a mode 4 IDE ATA HD with a 1.2 Ghz processor ).

That's not bad at all. Especially since it'd be SATA II harddrives in S/W RAID-0 with a 2.4 Duo Core processor. So, loading up that 12GB game folder wouldn't be a problem.

How do you think that compares to RAMDisk Plus 9.0 (which I do have a copy of)? As far as stability is concerned I do mean...

 

Well I know that the second link, the Cenatek beta, goes highly rated on OCZ Forums for people to use in conjunction with their SSD drives for temp files etc.

12GB game folder? That's a big game! Most are more around the 4GB - 7GB figure.

I personally use Gavotte's RAMDisk v1.0.4096.4 as it's free and enables me to use the area of RAM above 3.12GB on Windows 7 x86 which isn't normally available. The only problem is it hasn't got any sort of save facility so I only use it for temp files, page file and internet FF/IE cache.

 

Back in the day and the OS was Win95 and people talked alot about making a RAM disk partiton. I never thought it help just took up space.

With ram so cheap I have no idea why anyone would need one now. If it works for you great it didn't make a different when I did.

I guess some people still compress their hard drives also.

 

firefox can be configured to only cache into ram, no ramdisk needed.

hankaaron, your thoughts are really off. even if you "know what you talk about". espencially the listet games i know work great on vista so you just don't want to switch.

the only real solution would be vista64 + 8gb or more ram + ssd. and you know it

but anyways, good luck.


btw: the fun thing about source based games is, they visualy load data. that means, you won't gain any performance by going to ram. you will just have faster load times in between the games. so all the hazzle won't help for performance.


i actually would like to sit together with you to get vista working the way that you like it, and solves all your hazzles.. should not be a problem on your machine. (we have similar configurations but desktops for gaming at the club).

 

I admit that XP runs better on my girlfriend's Inspiron 1520 than Vista does, but she switched to Vista X64 recently because without it she was having problems playing new games branded "games for Windows" - Spore and Fallout 3.

 

I listed CS/DOD as examples, as I play those as staples daily. Please take a look at the 1730 thread to see peoples' benches and results with XP vs. Vista in games like Crysis and FarCry 2. You'd be surprised how much the random access memory has to do with in-game loading. When I upped from 2GB to 4GB installed (windows could only address 3GB of it on my 32-bit platform), scoping in with a Springfield sniper rifle while looking at a smoke grenade's remnants was very laggy and dropped to like 15 FPS at 2GB, and was sufficiently more smooth with the 3GB. It's small improvements like this which make the difference for my online gaming. If I can react to someone's movements quicker (someone quick-switch glitching with a K98) by less than a second, I'll have a better KDR. This is important to me. Loading times help too, especially since I'm minimizing the game very often as well. If I can join the server/next map loaded before everyone else, I can select classes that are restricted (sniper/support) - bearing in mind that my net connection is not the bottleneck. This is also important to me.

My XPS doesn't support more than probably 6 GB of RAM as it is, if someone was able to get their Inspiron to see that. I'm talking about this in merely hypothetical and planning terms. These are things I would want to try out when I got a new Clevo with like 8 or 16 GB of RAM - not my current setup.

I'm not concerned about removing the bloat from Vista. I have a copy of Server 2008 which is essentially that. I don't want to bother with Vista especially if Windows 7 is coming out anyways.