WoW from ramdisk?

[Ozbert]

There's been a fair bit of discussion of the merits of enterprise hard disks and SSD's for multiboxing and it got me thinking. What's the one thing that's faster still than an SSD?

System RAM. How about creating a ramdisk, copying the WoW install into that, along with symlinked copies, and running it from there?

With Vista 64, systems with 16GB of RAM are not impossible, so half of that could be allocated as a ramdisk (WoW+BC seems to take up about 8GB of disk space). At bootup, the WoW installation can be copied from disk to ramdisk and run from there with extremely low latency on file accesses. True, that copying process would be a slight pain each time you start Windows, but it shouldn't take more than a minute on the sort of PC's we run. At todays memory prices, I expect I could upgrade an 8GB system to 16GB for less than the cost of a WD Raptor.

The question is, how can a ramdisk be set up in Vista? Good old ramdrive.sys disappeared years ago and wasn't replaced. There are some third party ramdisk offerings but I have no idea how good they are.

Does anyone have a suitably large amount of memory to give this a try?

[Xzin]

Ok, drop 12 gigs or so of memory in a box - battery back it up and script it to copy over WoW once you make a RAM disk. It would be fast as hell but of course non persistent.

When it crashes - you will lose whatever you had. Not sure the speed benefit is worth it. Just go with a fast as hell SSD.

[suprafro]

What would you stand to gain with faster disk access? From my experience with 5 clients on one box my disk is not taxed at all while playing, it only gets hit when a new zone is loaded into memory

[aboron]

[quote='Xzin',index.php?page=Thread&postID=133055#p ost133055]Ok, drop 12 gigs or so of memory in a box - battery back it up and script it to copy over WoW once you make a RAM disk. It would be fast as hell but of course non persistent.

When it crashes - you will lose whatever you had. Not sure the speed benefit is worth it. Just go with a fast as hell SSD.[/quote]

I'm waiting for the box that is already going to do that all for me, plus a built in battery and automated backup/restore to/from flash if it looses system power.

[url='http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product.jsp?prod_no=ANS-9010&type1_title=%20Solid%20State%20Drive&idno_no= 270']http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product.jsp?prod_no=ANS-9010&type1_title=%20Solid%20State%20Drive&idno_no= 270[/url]

http://7r09d0r.blogspot.com/2008/07/...card-9010.html

[wowphreak]

just have a batch file copy everything to ram then symlink so that any data that needs to get written goes to the hard drive :P

[puppychow]

I dunno if my WOTLk is messed up but I have 14.5gb of data in my WOTLK beta DATA folder. That would make a RAM data folder impractical, unless you had 32GB of RAM.

[king.pa]

I went on this subjet a while ago..
And I made up a software raid array of two old disks within windows ... not bad at all, but with time going on.. it seems to slow itself down...
When I made thie raid array up .; Sathrah was wonderfull.. no lag, no pain, no alt loosing its follow ... but after a while, I have now those hangs again ...
my thread about this : A Raid array of Disk images volumes

I really miss a Quad CPU.. at leat that's my though