RAM Drive (SDW Bait)

[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).