Expensive way to reduce loading times

[Pycno]

Has anyone thought of storing WoW on a ram-drive? With a 1366-chipset you could buy 6x4Gb memory modules for a total of 24Gb ram. You could set up a ramdrive with 16Gb on it and move the WoW folder on it, and have 8Gb spare for applications.
Downsides are the WoW-folder would have to be copied into the ram-drive on every boot, and not to mention price.
Still, it would pretty much make all loading virtually instant, I dont even think you would see the loading screens anymore.
Its definately overkill for WoW, for the same cost you could have a raid-0 array of SSD's for each wow instance.

Anyone want to try this?

[outdrsyguy1]

why not just get a solid state drive....?
that's what i did, it's amazingly fast, love it.

[Owltoid]

Sam has talked about a RAM drive for about a year now. I'm not sure if he ever actually tried it.

[Pycno]

Seems like the price for motherboard + 24gigs of memory (4gb sticks) is around 1800$, a high cost considering SSD's are fast enough for most and way cheaper.

[Kicksome]

I think this is what you want - it uses normal PC memory, not FLASH so it's like 10 Microsecond access time. It finds files more than 500x faster than the worlds fastest SAS drive.

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm

And it's only like $450 + the ram cost, or $299 + ram cost.

[Fursphere]

The ram cost makes this an absurd idea. If you've got that much money to light on fire, buy two SSDs and put them in a raid array.

(still, props for thinking outside of the box - you're one of the few that can)

[Pycno]

What about symlinking files onto a software ram drive? Its no problem to assign a portion of your ram to make a super fast (yet small) "hard drive". Imagine if you could symlink the data folder that contains maps & terrain onto this super fast drive. Lets say the maps for Dalaran and Battlegrounds, you should arrive instantly at this location with no loading (apart from on-the-fly loading of characters, armor etc).

The data-folders from Doom 3 are compressed into .pak archives (or something similar), these can be extracted to decrease loading times (since the game doesnt have to extract during every loading sequence).

If it is possible to extract the .mpq folders in WoW then it should also be possible to symlink files of your choosing onto a super fast software ram-drive. Preloading the files so they dont have to be loaded during play. It would not cost anything as you would just be using the spare ram you have anyway.

This is something Im gonna look into, I think it will work and if it does then I will always be the first to enter any Battleground - all of my toons would occupy group 1 :)

[Ualaa]

If you find a way to make this work, and it's not overly expensive to do, post what you find.
I'm sure quite a few would be interested.

[gitcho]

A RAM disk will far outperform ANY SSD ... I tried to do this with Vista x64 and 12GB of RAM with no success ... good luck on finding reliable RAMdisk software for Vista or WIN7. You could go with a hardware ramdisk solution, which is still better than SSD, but your bottleneck will be your PCI bus. Multiple high end striped SSD's is probably your best bet.

[Trick]

Back in 1994, when I was just getting my computer business off the ground, a local company placed an order for 10 CAD stations. Top of the line for back then, 486DX2 66MHz, 16MB RAM, 10Mb NIC with coax option, 19 inch monitors that weighed more than the system did, etc.

Anyway, I lacked any professional burn-in tools, or even a proper workbench to construct 10 systems at once, so I had to improvise on both fronts. I got my hands on an old ping-pong table to build the systems on, sort of assembly-line style. And as I had an entire weekend to test them, a thought for the burn-in finally came to mind...

LAN Party, playing Doom in a RAM Drive!

[Igg]

My load time is already instant with 2x X-25 Intel SSD in Raid 0. Why bother with any other inane solutions?
http://img251.imageshack.us/img251/8097/hdtunebenchmarkintelrain.png (http://img251.imageshack.us/i/hdtunebenchmarkintelrain.png/)

[Multibocks]

Or you could get the barn burner that I have

http://www.fusionio.com/products/ioxtreme/

[Ualaa]

My load time is already instant with 2x X-25 Intel SSD in Raid 0.




How is the SSD holding up in RAID?
From what I've read, you cannot run TRIM in RAID.

I'm curious, as I'm interested in two larger SSD's, probably X25-M's in RAID for both warcraft and my OS.

[Igg]

My X-25s were G1 so it doesn't support trim anyway BUT it does have internal garbage collection that runs indepedant of any hardware configuration. To date, I've noticed 0 performance degradation, I just ran HD tune again and it gave me pretty much the same #s as the one posted above (which was taken when it was a new raid set with a fresh set of drives).

[Pycno]

What raid controller are you using? Integrated Intel or something more fancy?

[Sajuuk]

What raid controller are you using? Integrated Intel or something more fancy?
You do not need a fancy dedicated controller for RAID 0. The integrated one will work just fine.

[Ogloo]

Nice job thinking outside of the box! sorry to kinda go off on my own question, but dont want to make another forum to busy up the site..

Im looking to buy a SSD for my comp as my hard drive right now is 40 bucks from Bestbuy lol..
My loading times are sometimes very annoying especially right when i turn on my computer-----> wow
what to u guys recommend for 5 boxing, nice and smooth. (nothing over the top needed).

[Pycno]

SATA 6Gbs SSD's are already in stores some places, they are more expensive but also faster.

If you were to buy one now anyway, Intel X25-M 80Gb is what most would recommend.

[Igg]

What raid controller are you using? Integrated Intel or something more fancy?

I used the standard ICHR10 intel controller on my Asus p6t, though i'm nearing the 600mb/s cap for that controller

[WaffleFrie]

oh yeah? well i have a eide 2500rpm 60 gig YEAHHHHH what now!

...sorry, i'm too poor for any of this so i figured it'd get a chuckle out of you guys :p

[valle2000]

My load time is already instant with 2x X-25 Intel SSD in Raid 0. Why bother with any other inane solutions?
Is raid really necessary or can I keep my main WoW on the harddrive and get a single SSD to put my other copies of WoW on?

[botboxer]

idea behind raid 0 is to push more data throughout the available bandwidth. you can do pretty much whatever you want so long as you are prepared to deal with the consequences. I don't recommend a tape drive for wow though no matter how much money you will win in a bet at work...... since ssd drives don't have large capacities, you will tend to keep all wows on same hd in a nonraid environment as syslinks don't work cross volume.

[valle2000]

My thought is buying one 80 GB SSD and then put all my four slave copies on that one and have nothing else on that drive.

[Igg]

My thought is buying one 80 GB SSD and then put all my four slave copies on that one and have nothing else on that drive.

That will work very well for you, At work I run 1 40gb intel V series drive (100 bucks) and that works pretty well with only wow on it.

At home I run the first gen 80gb in raid 0 resulting in 160gb for OS/wow and any other games/apps.

[Noids]

My thought is buying one 80 GB SSD and then put all my four slave copies on that one and have nothing else on that drive.

This might be a strange question but I'm not sure. I have been boxing for the last 2 years using the one install of WoW and just opening up 5 separate instances. It used to be slightly annoying to fill in details, but keyclone did this automatically for me and now with ISBoxer each character has a virtualised folder to store settings etc.

Is there any performance improvement available from having 5 separate WoW folders in fact? Interested in opinions.

Cheers

[valle2000]

This might be a strange question but I'm not sure. I have been boxing for the last 2 years using the one install of WoW and just opening up 5 separate instances. It used to be slightly annoying to fill in details, but keyclone did this automatically for me and now with ISBoxer each character has a virtualised folder to store settings etc.

Is there any performance improvement available from having 5 separate WoW folders in fact? Interested in opinions.

You need multiple folders if you want to use different settings for each WoW instance (resolution, key bindings etc). Five may be "overkill" in many cases, but I personally want to know I can fine-tune each instance exactly the way I want. :)
But in most cases I think at least two folders are recommended. One were your master is launched since you may want to use higher graphic settings in that one. One folder where all your slave instances are launched since graphic can be set lower on those.

Edit: However, have never used ISBoxer so maybe you can do the same there?

[MiRai]

This question has been answered many many many times before. Running multiple instances from separate folders hurts performance due to disk caching.

[valle2000]

But can you set e.g. graphics to very high on master and low on slaves without having separate folders? Or activate “click to move” on slaves while not having it on master? And can all instances have the correct wow-account by default at login screen, so only password is needed (which easily can be broadcasted to all instances at the same time).

(And no, I don’t want to adjust any of these manually after each launch).

[Ualaa]

If you're using IS Boxer, it virtualizes your config file.. so one install, can have different settings on a per character basis.

You could even virtualize other files, if you want a prominent focus frame for your pvp toons, but no focus frames for your other toons, and are using a unit frame addon which only saves the configuration on a per account basis.

[MiRai]

You would either need file virtualization or you would need to symlink certain folders to be able to have separate unique settings across multiple accounts. We're beginning to derail this topic by talking about software but, ISBoxer provides file virtualization [other software solutions may as well but I'm only familiar with ISBoxer at the moment]. ISBoxer can do any of which you asked about in your previous post.

[Lax]

So back on topic, I started to run a test on this last year but 24GB was not sufficient for me to put WoW's data folder on a RAM drive and be able to comfortably run my 5 WoWs. I have another 8GB waiting to be put in my PC to do a real test, but haven't had a chance yet. (Plus I had to wait for a proper Windows 7 64-bit RAM drive)

Obviously, as has been pointed out, this is not a cost effective solution. It requires a server motherboard (I'm running dual quad-core Xeon) and lots of RAM. And to be honest, I'm happy enough with the performance from my WD Raptor. I just want to see how it performs. I'll share my results.

[Pycno]

Actually many socket 1366 desktop botherboards support 6x4gb dimms for a total of 24gb ram. If you take 24Gb and remove 6gb (for WoW and OS) you are still left with 18gb space. Wow should fit onto this, at least if you clean/delete cinematics and screenshots. I have not tested this at all and dont want to contradict you but it surprises me that it did not work, are you sure you did everything right?

[Lax]

Okay it looks like my motherboard is only recognizing 20-22GB, even with 32GB installed. And after trying it again today I'm having the same problem I recall having before -- WoW won't read some of the files. Previously I thought this was from not being able to fit everything on the ram disk, but I tried it with all of WoW on the ram disk instead of just the data folder, and no joy.

I think this is because of a bug in ImDisk (the ram disk I'm trying). Running chkdsk on the ram disk shows it has lots of errors.

I'll have to try with a commercial ram disk.

[Pycno]

There are many ramdrive-applications, maybe the one you tried just didnt work so good? Could be worthing installing several ram-drive free trials and see if some works better then others. Its weird that only 20-22Gb's of memory is recognized, maybe a bios update will fix it? Sure sounds like there something that isnt working exactly like it should at least, shouldnt be any errors on the drive imo.