RAM Drive (SDW Bait)

[remanz]

i used RAMDisk(a $10 software) for D3. Allocating 12G as a virtual disk. It performs as expected, fast read and fast write. But not day and night vs current gen SSD. It is a minor improvement if there is any.

however, the cost of having to fallback onto physical hard drive upon machine shut down and reload upon OS startup is too great IMO. My win7 start time went from 7 seconds (without RAMDISK loading stuff) to 1min 45 seconds. and My shut down takes like 10mins.

So in short, I think its worth using only for temp cache stuff (or use as scratch space for some software), where you do not have to copy onto it upon startup or offload it while shutting down.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Using the "mklink" command to hard-link the data folder to one in the RAMdrive probably makes the best sense. Not sure how much activity happens in WoW's cache folders but I suspect it's a lot less than the mpq files. Combine that with a startup script that does the copy and mklink setup, and it'll probably be the next best thing to transparent.

[MiRai]

i used RAMDisk(a $10 software) for D3. Allocating 12G as a virtual disk. It performs as expected, fast read and fast write. But not day and night vs current gen SSD. It is a minor improvement if there is any.

I wouldn't think that DIII would really benefit from a RAM drive; there's not really a lot of loading going on while playing is there? In real MMOs there is a vast world full of 3D environment/terrain, lots of character textures moving in and out of your camera view including a very large view distance in a 360° radius surrounding your player, and all of this needs to constantly be loaded and unloaded.

I'm not talking about seeing an improvement while walking from Goldshire to the Eastvale Logging Camp, I'm talking about trying to see an improvement in a large scale area with lots of players all in one place at the same time moving around and doing things; and that's why I can agree that it's probably not a big deal and slightly tedious to maintain a RAM drive.

On another note, RAM frequency controls how fast your RAM drive is although I'm not sure the price you pay for higher frequency RAM is really worth the speed increase it brings:

[Sam DeathWalker]

I wish I had time to set my stuffs up better, now that i have 64G ram (G skill also). Keep in mind that most wow transfers are 2K or less so the Seq and 512K spec is not as usefull as the 4K spec, for wow.


ImDisk and QSoft are free, while Primo Ramdisk (Romex Software) and Dataram RAMDisk are not. I think Primo Ramdisk (Direct IO) is the way to go because it gives the best performance when you average everything out. QSoft provides the best 4K reads but, I think that giving up about 200MB/sec on 4K reads for a gain of about 1,200MB/sec in sequential reads is a fair trade off seeing as WoW does a lot of sequential reading from its MPQ files during gameplay. I couldn't really care less about writes because WoW doesn't write much to the drive while you're playing unless you do a /reload.


Yes, writes is irrelivent. I think that the sequential reads are mostly during zoneing. I would go more for the faster 4K reads.

[daanji]

Are there any decent hardware based RAM Disks? I did a quick google search and the only thing I found was the i-Drive from Gigabyte.

That can only handle 4 GB though and looks to be pretty old tech.

[MiRai]

Are there any decent hardware based RAM Disks? I did a quick google search and the only thing I found was the i-Drive from Gigabyte.

That can only handle 4 GB though and looks to be pretty old tech.

RAM drives like that have come and gone since SSDs have hit the consumer market. There aren't many people willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a 32GB/64GB drive when you can get a 128GB SSD for 1/4th of the price.

[daanji]

Well, I tried out Primo Ramk Disk Standard Edition. I made a 8 GB RAM Disk and put all the most heavily used MPQ files on it and used symbolic links on my WoW Data directory.

This include the following

world.MPQ
texture.MPQ
itemtexture.MPQ
model.MPQ

My system has 24 GB and my 10-box setup uses about 13 GB. So with 8 GB dedicated to the RAM Disk, I had plenty of head room for WoW.

Load times were shorter and running around in Org with my 10-box was significantly improved.

I played a battle ground, AV, and at the start it went very smooth. However, about 1/2 through the game I started getting crazy lag where all 10 clients were freeze up.

I'm not sure if it was the RAM Disk making my system unstable or something unrelated.

I will do a few more tests to confirm.

[daanji]

After doing more testing today, I determined that the source of the lag was my router. Apparently it was in a bad state and nothing but a hard reboot would cure it.


Anyway, I tried the RAM disk again with the above MPQ files on it. I saw significant improvements in overall game play. Everything was just smoother, especially in large 40-man battlegrounds.


One big improvement that I noticed is that "Interact With Target Circle-Jerk". With 5-boxing, my melee teams were always right on top of the target doing the circle of death.
With 10-boxing, my toons would do large circle-jerks around the target, which I attributed to CPU limitations.
With the RAM Disk, they circle the target much tighter than before. I'm not sure why this is the case. I assume that since the RAM Disk is too faster, the CPU has more time to do other times.

[remanz]

interesting. I gotta try this out. Do you have your wow on a standard SSD (so you are doing SSD + ram disk)

[daanji]

I have 2x SSD in RAID 0, I get about 600 MB/s with those in addition to the 8 GB RAM Disk.

So far, I think this is a reasonable trade off. It takes about 10 seconds to transfer the 8 GB of MPQ files to the RAM Disk, so restoring it isn't a problem.