RAM Drive (SDW Bait)

[MiRai]

Earlier today, against my better judgement, I picked up 32GB of RAM for my old, yet still a beast, P67 system. It's going to replace the 16GB I currently have in there now which has been holding me back in a few different ways.

First and foremost, 32GB will allow me do more with video editing, but it should also allow me to run more than 30 clients on my machine at once. As much as I like to push the limits of a system I've really been wanting to fire up a full raid of 40 to cruise around a major city but, 16GB has held me back. Also, seeing as WoW's new file system has dramatically decreased the amount of space that it takes up on the drive (currently 19.5GB for me), I should be able to fit the entire folder into a RAM drive and then have about 10GB left on my system which is plenty to run a 5-box, or maybe even, a 10-box test.

For those interested, I chose the G.Skill Ripjaws to replace the Corsair Vengeance I currently have in there now. I've heard nothing but good things about G.Skill and I've really wanted to try them out -- Now I'll get my chance.

If UPS wants to show up at my door on Saturday, then hopefully I can get this show on the road sooner than later. I've been thinking of revamping the Multiboxing Hardware Science sticky anyway since MoP has given a slight update to the video engine and I figured this might be a nice way to start it all off.

In all actuality, I highly doubt I'd use a RAM drive for everyday use unless it shows some unbelievably fantastic results that I don't get when using an SSD -- But I think it'll be fun to play with none-the-less.

I'll start Googling and looking around other hardware forums, but does anyone here have any experience with RAM drive software?

UPDATE: Playing with some different choices at the moment:





Decisions, decisions...


Note: Don't mind that the Direct IO is using an 8GB drive. It was a comparison run versus a 4GB drive to see if performance changed by doubling the size of the drive -- There was no difference in performance between the two.

[Blubber]

I'm curious to see if this will bring significant improvements, although I kind of doubt it. I'm guessing the load on the disk is very low while playing, except for some heavy spikes when it's loading textures, but we'll see. Also, how come writing is almost twice as fast as reading?

[MiRai]

I'm curious to see if this will bring significant improvements, although I kind of doubt it. I'm guessing the load on the disk is very low while playing, except for some heavy spikes when it's loading textures, but we'll see. Also, how come writing is almost twice as fast as reading?

I really have no idea why the read/write speeds differ so much... I'm totally new to all of this.

The improvement should be seen when in a heavily populated area like a major city or possibly a PvE raid or a large-scale PvP battle. I won't be able to test either a PvE or PvP raid so we'll just have to go off of what I can figure out in a highly populated city.

[Blubber]

The improvement should be seen when in a heavily populated area like a major city or possibly a PvE raid or a large-scale PvP battle. I won't be able to test either a PvE or PvP raid so we'll just have to go off of what I can figure out in a highly populated city.

Yes, but even in these situations I think io load is just a big spike, after that the textures are either in the vram or buffered in ram, at least I hope windows works this way (I have no clue, don't really use that crap for anything else then boxing). Which basically means that it might give you a big improvement, in a very small number of situations. I'm not quite sure it's worth the hassle of copying everything into ramdisk, and keeping both installs in sync.

[MiRai]

I'm not quite sure it's worth the hassle of copying everything into ramdisk, and keeping both installs in sync.

That's why I mention I probably won't use it for everyday use; but copying WoW from an SSD to a RAM drive at ~500MB/sec, that only really takes about a minute to copy the entire folder.

[alcattle]

What were the times like using a SSD? Would be helpful to compare

[MiRai]

What were the times like using a SSD? Would be helpful to compare

It varies and I don't want to bench my own SSDs right now. 560MB/510MB /sec sequential read/write is probably the max "rated" speed you'll see on the packaging of an SSD, however, real world performance varies from that as you can see in any SSD review.

Those three different software choices I have in the original post are showing over 10 times the speed of an SSD during a sequential read or write, and about 4-10 times as fast in the 4K area (both which are important while playing WoW).

[MiRai]

Alright, so I looked through a handful of threads on other forums, and I picked out 4 different pieces of software to test out on my system as it currently is. I'm looking for software that'll provide high numbers in the sequential (SEQ) and 4K areas because that's what WoW, and I would assume most other games, use the most.

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.

[daanji]

Instead of putting the entire WoW folder into RAM, would it be possible to just put a portion of it? Perhaps the MPQ where all the textures are located or the mostly heavily accessed file?

I have 24 GB of RAM and I'm 10-boxing, sure wouldn't mind faster load times but I could only make a 6-12 GB RAM drive.

[MiRai]

Instead of putting the entire WoW folder into RAM, would it be possible to just put a portion of it? Perhaps the MPQ where all the textures are located or the mostly heavily accessed file?

I have 24 GB of RAM and I'm 10-boxing, sure wouldn't mind faster load times but I could only make a 6-12 GB RAM drive.

The Data folder is where the MPQs are stored and it takes up 96% of my actual WoW folder. You might as well just throw the entire thing into RAM.