Fun things to do with RAM disk?

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MegaVovaN

Diamond Member
May 20, 2005
4,131
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Hi all!
There are free and premium apps that can make a disk drive using space on RAM.
Like, say you have 8 GB RAM, you can make 4 gb RAM disk with extremely fast read/write speeds.

So I was thinking, With 8gb RAM, one can make a kickass game server. Copy server files onto 4 gb RAM disk, and run it. Other 4 gb should be enough to keep track of all players and operating system.

Man, map changes must be ultrafast this way! (Some Counter-Strike: Source servers take long time to load maps)

Parts I ordered come with only 4 gb RAM, but eventually I can upgrade to 8.

What other cool things can YOU think of to do with few GBs of super fast storage?
 
C

chizow

Diamond Member
Jun 26, 2001
9,537
2
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Originally posted by: MegaVovaN
Hi all!
There are free and premium apps that can make a disk drive using space on RAM.
Like, say you have 8 GB RAM, you can make 4 gb RAM disk with extremely fast read/write speeds.

So I was thinking, With 8gb RAM, one can make a kickass game server. Copy server files onto 4 gb RAM disk, and run it. Other 4 gb should be enough to keep track of all players and operating system.

Man, map changes must be ultrafast this way! (Some Counter-Strike: Source servers take long time to load maps)

Parts I ordered come with only 4 gb RAM, but eventually I can upgrade to 8.

What other cool things can YOU think of to do with few GBs of super fast storage?
Click to expand...

I looked into this recently but unfortunately its not quite enough for what I want to do with it...basically store whatever game I'm playing most on the RAM disk to reduce load/zone times. Sadly most new games now are larger than 4GB. Instead I'm looking at SSD to replace the small, high-performance storage niche previously held by SCSI, Raptors, RAID 0 etc and am looking forward to AT's upcoming SSD review.
 
M

MegaVovaN

Diamond Member
May 20, 2005
4,131
0
0
chizow, I realize today's games won't fit in 4 gb.
However, servers just might. Dedicated server files do not include cinematics (movies), music, and most sounds (sounds are on client's machine).
 
Nothinman

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
30,672
0
0
Man, map changes must be ultrafast this way! (Some Counter-Strike: Source servers take long time to load maps)
Click to expand...

With that much memory the maps would end up being cached anyway so moving them to the ramdisk or just reading them into memory once would be effectively the same thing.
 
her209

her209

No Lifer
Oct 11, 2000
56,336
11
0
I'm using it to store my Firefox cache. Not really much difference, really.
 
BonzaiDuck

BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
16,052
1,681
126
An earlier issue of CPU Power-User Magazine late in 2007 has a DIY article on making Windows-VISTA swap-file access lightning-fast.

Apparently, the OS can configure a USB flash/thumb-drive to use for storing the swap-file. Since there's a risk that someone may pull the flash-drive out of its socket when in use, the article shows how to solder together a motherboard USB connector and a flash-drive stripped of its plastic case and plug -- a fairly easy project.

You then just plug in the flash-drive to the motherboard, and leave it there.

I'm still wondering why you cannot do this with WIN XP. As far as I understand, you can put the swapfile for one or more drives on ANY drive connected to the system. The usual advice in recent years was to spread the swapfile capacity around, so that there is a swapfile for every HD. But I don't see why you wouldn't have an improvement by making "DRIVE F:" = 8GB flash-drive the repository for "the" swapfile for your XP system.
 
Nothinman

Nothinman

Elite Member
Sep 14, 2001
30,672
0
0
Apparently, the OS can configure a USB flash/thumb-drive to use for storing the swap-file. Since there's a risk that someone may pull the flash-drive out of its socket when in use, the article shows how to solder together a motherboard USB connector and a flash-drive stripped of its plastic case and plug -- a fairly easy project.
Click to expand...

Or you just use ReadyBoost which does essentially that without the need to solder anything.

The usual advice in recent years was to spread the swapfile capacity around, so that there is a swapfile for every HD. But I don't see why you wouldn't have an improvement by making "DRIVE F:" = 8GB flash-drive the repository for "the" swapfile for your XP system.
Click to expand...

The usual advice is to just leave it alone, the amount of time spent tweaking the pagefile is almost always larger than the resulting benefit.
 
R

rasczak

Lifer
Jan 29, 2005
10,437
22
81
knowing that thumbdrives have been out for years now, why did it take so long to come up with this solution? as well these things are ungodly expensive
 
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