Think the SSD in your Clevo is fast?

Try a RAMdisk. I ran benchmarks on the SSD and HDD in my P150HM then decided to try out a RAMdisk and RAMdisk+VM

Standard 500GB HDD (7200RPM)


Kingston 128GB SSD (Not blazing fast, but it's not bad)


RAMdisk



That's right, the RAMdisk is showing speeds 25x faster than the SSD and nearly 75x faster than the HDD. This is to be expected, for anyone that's used RAMdisks. They're blazing fast because they rely entirely on your volatile memory. Also note that RAMdisks + Vmware only work well on machines with heaps of RAM. I have 16GB and use 4GB for the VM and 4GB for the RAMdisk, as it's holding the hard drive for the virtual machine.

Now the really cool part was that I shoehorned Windows XP onto the 4GB RAMdisk partition. (And for anyone familiar with how long a Windows XP install takes - installing to RAMdisk using an ISO image cuts the install from initial boot to desktop to a measly 4 minutes flat).

The following benchmark is the XP virtual machine:


As you can see, it's still 2.5x faster than the SSD in the primary machine. (I'm limited by the CPU speed/formatting/VM for faster benchmarks).

Either way, it's pretty awesome. Anyone that wants the fastest performance out there should consider running a RAMdisk + VM and trying out their favorite game or harddisk intensive tasks

And I guess it goes without saying, but everything in that VM runs instantaneously. My regular SSD looks like a slowpoke by comparison. It boots to the desktop in <5 seconds. I think from here on out I will probably not be able to say that you won't notice the difference between a cheap SSD and a more expensive one.

 

so is this a free ware? and if only have 8gb can i use 2gb of my ram and still be ok?

 

Yep, it's free- but you're limited to 4GB or less in the free version. More than 4GB requires the paid version.

RAMDisk - Software - Server Memory Products & Services - Dataram

You should be ok with 4GB in the RAMdisk, 2GB for the VM, and 2GB left for Windows, but that will be cutting things tight. You could conceivably cut the XP VM RAM down to 512MB or 1GB though, as it really doesn't need that much.

 

could i just run my windows off of my normal hard drive, and just use 2gb of the RAMDISK for one game?

 

Sure, it just works like any other hard drive on the machine after you've created, formatted, and mounted it. It is volatile though, so once you shut it down or reboot it's gone. (In which case, use the option in the software to back up the drive on shutdown)

 

yes thats what i figured, i would load the game on to it from my hdd everytime i start my pc. im gonna try it right now.

 

I haven't played any really modern games lately, but what game that needs that extra speed fits in 2GB of space?

 

i think bfbc2 is around 2gb on the disk at least.

 

nvm its not its like 8gb, but maybe i can store like the maps on there or something. or i could do bf2, which is just under 4gb. also i think in the bfbc2 folder there is a bunch of junk, likethe vietnam maps that came with the last patch, but aren't used unless you bought it.

 

lotro can benefit a whole lot from ramdisk'ing the massive amount of textures it uses. The Windows 7 OS is too crappy to automatically cache the massive amount of textures it continually swaps in and out.

 

is there anyway to move only part of the gamefiles to the ramdisk?
i made a new thread to ask this

can this be done with the gddr5 video ram, that would be insanely fast!

I set up a 4gb RAMDisk and dedicated it to readyboost, so it should help boost performance, like a hybrid hdd on steroids!

 

so is there anyway to set it up so it uses 4gb of ram like a hybrid drive, even manually, by using symbolic links, for instance with certain files for games, like the maps and weapons, and things that are loaded often.

Using Symlinks in Windows Vista - How-To Geek

 

the down side of ramdisk is that you have to wait for your data to be loaded and unloaded from and back to the HDD, which will make your shutdown and startup very slow.

unless it's only used as a temp space keeping only data you don't mind losing in the ram drive, or that you never turn off your system plus the system stable enought to never crash. as you will lose everything that has not been written back to the HDD.

 

i was thinking about for a game, like the directory for a game to be loaded into the ramdisk, and then linked so that it uses them. It would be stupid to load the windows system into the RAMDISK, without having a backup, plus that would require at least 16gb, so its not even plausible, except on something that can support 32gb of ram, which at that point would cost around 2500 to get all 4 8gb sticks. and honestly it takes like 20 seconds to load in 4gb from hdd, and even less to save it as the transfer from the hdd to the ram disk runs at the full speed of the hdd ~(100mb/s), although i did see it writing it from the ramdisk to the hdd at 270MB/s for about 5 seconds.

 

wow this is really fast - but in terms of performance for demanding games, has anyone ran any benchmarks to see what the FPS benefit is? If it's the difference between playable and choppy, then I think it may be worth it.

 

i played bf2 with it hahaha lol roflcopter, that was all i could fit in the 4gb. im trying to see if i can link the directory from bfbc2 so i can put some of the files in the ramdisk.

 

I have to experiment with this RAM virtualdisk too. My boss suggested it . It might make our program run faster, but it's processor intensive software with only few data reading/writing in it. Still seems fun to test

 

lol it writes faster than it reads, write max was 6000mb/s and read max was 5000mb/s. oh and this warrants getting 16gb, and from newegg you can get 4gb modules for $25 each for 1333 and $30 each for 1600mhz, and 75 each for 1866pnp type.

 

what i was trying to say is the same, by loading the game data even if it's only 500mb to the ramdisk.

your windows will now have to unload that 500mb of data from ram back to hdd when you want to shutdown, and then reload that 500mb back into ram from hdd when starting up.

this will be done at the shutting down page, and the starting windows page.

making extra long wait for you to get in and out of windows.

so unless you are willing to lose all data in the ramdisk each time you plan to power cycle your system, by not letting it to load and unload a pre made image ramdisk will give you a bigger drawback then any bonus.

ramdisk doesn't load the files on it's own but it creates a virtual disk image of the data you store in it and then load and unload it to memory.

example the ramdisk image files will be like a iso file of a CD or DVD.

each time the system powers up it has to first read and burn that .iso into memory before you get into windows. and then it has to recreate the .iso file on the hdd each time you shutdown the system to save any changes for the next boot up it doesn't work in realtime. it will depend on the speed of the HDD that the imagefile is stored on which it needs to read and write with.

 

why would the files need to be saved back, just save the files that changed back to your normal hdd and make one copy of the files that stay the same and you don't need to save it back every time, and it has settings for when to load the RAMDISK and when to put in the files. i usually do it after i have loaded my desktop, plus it transfers at maximum speed of your hdd so 80 to 100mb/s.

 

exactly, so now you have to copy that data at 80 to 100mb/s. every time when you want to use it which will be the same speed if you let it auto load by lettng it preload before logging.

to do this is to copy the fiels into the ram disk and then, do a manual save of the image, leaving auto save when shutdown unchecked. so it doesn't make any changes.

then every time you boot up it would load it for you, just take a bit time. which you are doing it manually atm.

however what if you start placing files in the ramdisk that you don't want to lose as it has changes made to it.

you now have option a, remember to copy it back to HDD before shutdown.

or option b, let it auto save during shutdown.

 

yeah but for the most part those files wont change, only things like settings will change in a game, which can be stored in the main hdd, and since im only linking the directory for the game files, it wont make a difference to me, and if i can get a bunch more performance out of a game, by taking a minute or so everytime i restart my pc, it would be worth it. although now that i think about it, the load time of the game is probably more dependent on how long it takes to upload data to and from the server.

 

Yeah if you only store non changing files in it it will be great when you don't mind the initial load. but i just wanted to make sure others get the info on how the ramdisk works so they don't start placing bunch of important data on it and then losing their data. as ramdisk is great to be used as a Scratch disk not as a true data disk.

and i just want to mention another minor drawbacks ramdisk will have, is that windows vista and windows 7 likes to cache random stuff alot. so it will eat up as much system memory as it can from time to time. and when that gets full and old, it will need to do a memory flush to refresh everything. which during that time your ramdisk data will be mad laggy .

 

So if you 16 gigs of RAM, what could you do with this? I'm a noob to all of this, so I'm trying to learn, haha.

 

you could load a whole game into your ramdisk, and then you would see a massive performance increase. 10x the performance that you would see from even the best ssd, but only in the game, and it would have to loaded in everytime you boot.

 

Wow, that's amazing. How long does the procedure take?

 

I wonder though when some of you suggest "performance" boost. Loading screens will be nonexistent, but i'm not sure if FPS will improve much since your video card will still need to churn the same amount of data.

 

yes true, but it will do the same thing as an ssd, just better. and you literally download the program install it and make the ram disk, so its really easy.

 

Awesome.

So if you want to load Windows onto the ramdisc, is that even easy? Because if the virtual disc disappears every time you turn off the computer, how can you take advantage of a faster boot up time?

 

well you cant do that because ram is volitale meaning that when power is removed the memory is lost so you would have to install it every time you boot. in theory you could load a lite version of xp from a flash drive onto the ramdisk and then boot from that, but thats kindof risky.

 

Why is it risky?

 

It's not risky, it's just not efficient. RAMdisks are generally excellent for people that need a scratch disk. (Or more specifically, for people that are developing/encoding video or photo editing, where they do a lot of disk access and the storage is only temporary anyway). Running on OS on a RAMdisk is really only a good idea on always-on machines with heaps of RAM and a good backup/snapshot system for the VM's running on it.