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.

[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.

[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.

[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!