RAM Drive (SDW Bait)

[MiRai]

Apologies for not getting back to this sooner...

I'll be honest, I didn't see a big improvement while taking a 5-man team to Orgrimmar on Illidan during peak hours and unless you really just want a RAM drive to have a RAM drive... I'd say a current gen SSD paired up with a nice beefy CPU/GPU will net you very similar results.

I wanted to see if a 10-man team would benefit more from the drive, but I couldn't take all 10 to Orgrimmar without having a few random instances crash due to running out of memory (what was left of it after the RAM drive). Oh well...

As others in the thread have shown, using free software can be a little more tedious getting the RAM drive all setup and working, but once it works it works. If you're willing to dish out $50 for a 2 PC lifetime license from Romex Software for Primo Ramdisk, you can do all kinds of crazy things with it. I say $50 because the $20 Standard Edition license only lets you create a drive with a maximum size of 8GB so you're forced to kick it up to the Professional Edition for a 32GB max.

I'm obviously no expert in this field, and I'm sure you can accomplish the same thing with free software if you're willing to work with it, but Primo Ramdisk seemed to offer the best overall package with a very nice GUI. It has a fully functional free 30-day trial that I used to conduct the testing that I did.

I use a single ssd (intel 520 series) and the file transfer to ram was very short. I'll time it today when I get home.

Should take about a minute to move the entire folder into the RAM drive from an SSD hooked up via SATAIII.

[Multibocks]

Ok so I bought the Primo edition and I am unsure how to make it automagically load the WoW folder every time I start up. The FAQ isn't helping much, and help would be very appreciated!

[Sam DeathWalker]

This guy does some ram drive comparisons with wow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSXq6uJrRs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAOIV4KhlRM

[JohnGabriel]

This guy does some ram drive comparisons with wow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOSXq6uJrRs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAOIV4KhlRM

Been getting alot of emails about the new Dimmdrive, either its from the same author of pwnboxer or he is an affiliate because they are sent from him.

Waiting to see what others thought of it.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I don't know about dimmdrive itself, I just saw the videos while looking for other things. Its not clear to me what it brings to the table beyond what I currently use. It does appear to be more convient and real time file sync whereas I have spend about 3 mintues to load and 10 seconds to unload my ram drive, and true enough if there is a power failure prior to me unloading (or I forget which has happened) the ram drive back to hard disk I will lose data. Still I don't see much advantage but of course there is no disadvantage either and it looks much simpler to set up.

[ebony]

Been getting alot of emails about the new Dimmdrive, either its from the same author of pwnboxer or he is an affiliate because they are sent from him.

Waiting to see what others thought of it.

yep its tim alright his main forums for his dualboxing is has closed down, follow has his live stream hard. so he moved on to the next "big thing"

[Ualaa]

When I registered on the newer multiboxing.com forum, Tim gave me a license for the Dimm Drive.

It seems really easy to use.
You set how large you want the ram drive to be.
You either drag a program shortcut into the launch area, or right click and configure the path.
There's another area for Steam games, basically the same deal.

Once a game is there, you click its bar to turn the application on/off.
There's a big button for Enable/Disable, which when clicked will launch the drive with anything that is set to be on.

You can then launch anything, that has been set to 'on', by clicking its' icon.

The DimmDrive syncs really quickly, which is the main feature it provides compared with other RamDrives I've heard of.
I've not actually launched anything, that would take advantage of being on a RamDrive... so cannot really comment on its performance.
The benchmark tool within it, from the video shows a pretty good increase in read/write performance compared with the platter drive.



There are some more advanced features.
You can set it to launch, when your system boots.
Which reduces the time before you're able to launch things... there is a small delay, when the drive enables.

You can also use a start up drive feature.
Basically hook up a USB hard drive, which might be faster to launch from, than from a platter drive.

[daviddoran]

Any updates to the RAM Drive question now that you have 64GB? I have 64 myself and most of the time it sits unused, so I figure if there's any improvement, it's worth it. I'm just concerned that if the PC crashes or the power goes out, I lose data, so I'd like to know which software package handles the folder synch the best.

DimmDrive looks pretty good to me, designed with gaming in mind rather than general computing.

[MiRai]

Any updates to the RAM Drive question now that you have 64GB? I have 64 myself and most of the time it sits unused, so I figure if there's any improvement, it's worth it. I'm just concerned that if the PC crashes or the power goes out, I lose data, so I'd like to know which software package handles the folder synch the best.

DimmDrive looks pretty good to me, designed with gaming in mind rather than general computing.

I honestly don't have any new information at this time and the new machine that I just built was showing numbers that I wasn't happy with when using the RAM Drive, that is, until I OC'd the processor -- Now they're back on par.

But, I'm going to stick to my original conclusion that a RAM drive really doesn't give that much of a performance boost over a modern high-performance SSD using a SATA III interface. When moving from a traditional HDD over to an SSD, you can definitely feel the boost in performance; but when moving from an SSD to a RAM Drive... There's just not that much of a noticeable improvement, if any, at all.

The textures have the ability to load ~20x faster when using a RAM Drive, but we're (referring to MMO players) still restricted by latency and how fast the server can deliver the information to our client(s).

As for the syncing stuff, I haven't delved too deep into the Primo software that I use and I'm not really too concerned with it because I would never expect to be working on my UI or anything like that when using the RAM Drive. Seeing as it takes about 60 seconds to move the entire WoW folder from my SSD into a RAM Drive, I would have done any work on my UI (or whatever else) and then moved the folder to the RAM Drive to play.

-------------------------------

To elaborate on my original conclusion:

A full 64GB of RAM can be pricey and anyone who doesn't have a system that's capable of handling that much RAM shouldn't feel like they're missing out on some ridiculous, must have, performance boost that's going to give them an edge in their favorite game. Hell, even those who do have a system capable of handling that much RAM shouldn't feel that way because, again, RAM at 8x8GB is expensive.

I'd highly recommend putting your money toward a nice fast SSD instead, specifically for your games and not being shared with the OS, and then you can enjoy 3-8 second loading screens -- They don't get much faster than that. Then put the extra money you just saved toward a new CPU or GPU so that you can turn up the video settings and get more FPS.

[Ualaa]

Having played around with DimmDrive a bit, I don't notice any improvement compared to not using it with Everquest I.
It could be, that the game is older and the system is not pushed by it at all... I remember much poorer performance, when the game was current.

Logging into the game, and changing zones, is fairly quick (about the same amount of time) with my normal drives or the DimmDrive.
I've got a pair of OCZ Vertex 3s, in RAID 0, as my Windows/Gaming Drive.

I'd expect a large improvement over a platter drive.
But a ram drive should still be quite a bit faster than an SSD (or 2x SSD in Raid 0).