heyaz
02-28-2013, 05:31 PM
I've been experimenting with a RAMDisk setup since I got my new system and have enough ram to spare (64GB).
I did a search for *.mpq, the files wow loads its textures and other data from and all were located in the /Data folder in the WoW directory.
Putting other stuff in the a RAM disk prevents any changes (such as to WTF, Addons, etc.) and I didn't see a need to have this in there, so I just did the /Data directory.
I grabbed SoftPerfect RAMDisk since it was free. Here's what I do:
1. Rename existing WoW folder to /Data2
2. Create a 30GB RamDisk (actually only needs about 27GB I think) as NTFS and mount it to R:
3. Create a junction (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx) [EDIT: This is built-in, you don't need to install the SysInternals version) in Windows 7 (hard symlink, haven't researched the differences but it seems to work) from c:/wow/Data/ to r:/Data2 (ramdisk). The junction does not need to be re-created when I dump the ram disk.
4. Copy c:/wow/Data2 to r:/Data2, takes about 30 seconds, bottleneck is the SSDs of course not the RAM.
5. Load WoW as normal.
Several hours of play and no issues. I've had a few random crashes but I had similar ones without the ram disk so it may just be system stability since it's new.
Performance is very very good, near instant load times into just about anything except Shrine (takes 2-3 seconds). Textures and player models load instantly everywhere. I'm running SSDx2 in RAID 0 which is already pretty decent but I figure with the RAM why not make it a little faster.
Disk benchmarks are showing about 900MB/sec on the SSD's vs over 8GB/sec in RAM.
If you have the RAM I highly recommend giving this a try. If you have experience with any other programs I'd love to hear about it. I'd like one with a little more automation I think, auto-mounting my drive and setting up that junction.
One note is I also have Windows' swap file completely disabled as I never get anywhere near using all 64GB even with the RAM disk taking up 30GB of it, and swapping in Windows is pre-emptive and slow and with 64GB RAM, ain't nobody got time fo dat.
I did a search for *.mpq, the files wow loads its textures and other data from and all were located in the /Data folder in the WoW directory.
Putting other stuff in the a RAM disk prevents any changes (such as to WTF, Addons, etc.) and I didn't see a need to have this in there, so I just did the /Data directory.
I grabbed SoftPerfect RAMDisk since it was free. Here's what I do:
1. Rename existing WoW folder to /Data2
2. Create a 30GB RamDisk (actually only needs about 27GB I think) as NTFS and mount it to R:
3. Create a junction (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx) [EDIT: This is built-in, you don't need to install the SysInternals version) in Windows 7 (hard symlink, haven't researched the differences but it seems to work) from c:/wow/Data/ to r:/Data2 (ramdisk). The junction does not need to be re-created when I dump the ram disk.
4. Copy c:/wow/Data2 to r:/Data2, takes about 30 seconds, bottleneck is the SSDs of course not the RAM.
5. Load WoW as normal.
Several hours of play and no issues. I've had a few random crashes but I had similar ones without the ram disk so it may just be system stability since it's new.
Performance is very very good, near instant load times into just about anything except Shrine (takes 2-3 seconds). Textures and player models load instantly everywhere. I'm running SSDx2 in RAID 0 which is already pretty decent but I figure with the RAM why not make it a little faster.
Disk benchmarks are showing about 900MB/sec on the SSD's vs over 8GB/sec in RAM.
If you have the RAM I highly recommend giving this a try. If you have experience with any other programs I'd love to hear about it. I'd like one with a little more automation I think, auto-mounting my drive and setting up that junction.
One note is I also have Windows' swap file completely disabled as I never get anywhere near using all 64GB even with the RAM disk taking up 30GB of it, and swapping in Windows is pre-emptive and slow and with 64GB RAM, ain't nobody got time fo dat.