Ram disks are great (SoftPerfect)

[heyaz]

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 [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.

[MiRai]

I moved this to hardware because it involves system RAM and is better suited for this sub-forum. Anyone who is interested in this thread should also check out the older RAM Drive thread: http://www.dual-boxing.com/threads/4...ive-(SDW-Bait)

[HPAVC]

Not sure why you want to use junction here, what not symlinks? Nobody with xp/2000 or 32bit is going to be doing this.

I think your better off having two wows, one for patching and one for running in the hybrid ssd+ramdisk.

Have the startup for the hybrid maintain the data directory; create the ramdisk, format it, and mount it. When you would mount it not as a drive letter but just as your data directory. Then you can robo copy over the patched data directory contents. If you wish you can mount both as a path and as letter.

I can imagine making a volume clone on disk to restore this faster than the copy.

[heyaz]

Was in a hurry when I first created it, wasn't sure if a Windows 7 symlink would be completely transparent to WoW but I knew a junction would. Reading up on symlinks in Win7 now they appear to work the same, so I guess I could use that instead

[Sam DeathWalker]

Im using softperfect now also.

I read the whole wow folder into ram with allwaysync and then read it back to the hard drive before shut down. it does take 4 or so minutes to read from the hard drive to the ram drive but reading from the ram drive to the hard drive is under 10 seconds cause only the files that change need to be written back.

I have no problems with this set up. I have not disabled the windows swap file.

[SuperMiguel]

is there a big advatage on doing this vs having raid 0 ssd? i have 3 ssd in raid 0 getting more than 1k read speeds.. i realize that with ram you can get 8 times that but... is it noticeable?

[MiRai]

is it noticeable?

RAM Drive VS 3x SSDs in RAID0? No.

[heyaz]

I notice it when I'm 10+ boxing and I'm in very high load zones. A lot. 8GB/sec vs 1GB is a huge deal. Of course not everyone is playing on an ultra high pop server like Illidan and trying to run 10-12 clients around Shrine and Vale during primetime, or go to the Docks in AV and pop army of the dead...

so would I recommend building a system with that much ram just for the ram drive? No. If your SSD's are performing great and you don't get clients choking and drop to 1 fps when turning, there's just no need for it. It would be superfluous.

[SuperMiguel]

And between 32GB vs 64GB RAM? can it help boxing?

[MiRai]

And between 32GB vs 64GB RAM? can it help boxing?

Are you still asking about RAM drives or RAM in general?