Got lots of RAM? Try RAMDISK with a twist, DIMMDRIVE

[Fire&Blood]

So this gentleman has been working on a application known as Dimmdrive. Designed for Windows 7, 8 and 10, this software acts, essentially, as a RAMdisk, but only for the select programs you tell it to load into memory, rather than loading an entire operating system. It appears to work nicely with Steam but in theory, it offers extensive options rather than the typical RAMDISK method of loading the entire OS into RAM. This is mainly being targeted at gamers but is also viable for other programs as well. In short, it will load an entire application into memory (should you have the space for it) almost completely removing loading times caused by the CPU waiting for data to be sent from a hard drive and even a solid state drive. Supposedly, it eliminates texture pop-in and lag spikes in games as well as I/O bottlenecks.

Again, RAMDISK's are nothing new but the way this syncs and saves the changes to your traditional drives combines the advantages of standard drives and RAMDISK unlike anything I have seen before. App has been greenlit on Steam, seems legit.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/337070

http://dimmdrive.com/

 

[sxr7171]

Kind of interested in this. Probably Ubisoft should sell it too. Anyway with 16GB RAM I'm not sure how many games would fit in it.

Edit: Okay I just read that it will let you put only certain files on RAMdisk. The key to all of this is the developer figuring out with the help of the community which files need to be on the RAMdisk. I could buy this and have no idea which files should be on the RAMdisk for maximum performance. If such profiles are released then this would be an amazing product. In fact it pretty tempting to upgrade to 32GB on account of this.

 

[Rakehellion]

What game can actually fit in RAM? Seems like they's just use nore aggressive caching if this were a problem.

 

[Carson Dyle]

I'ts been years since I used any kind of RAMdisk, but I thought that's how they worked ... you only loaded select files into the RAMdisk (not the entire OS). Then you'd periodically write/sync any data files to HDD in the background.

Looks like the real advantage is that it has a user interface that makes using it for games easier.

 

[Subyman]

Would have been cool a few years ago. RAM is so expensive now though.

 

[BFG10K]

Designed for Windows 7, 8 and 10, this software acts, essentially, as a RAMdisk, but only for the select programs you tell it to load into memory, rather than loading an entire operating system.

The bolded part makes no sense. A RAM disk program can't control where OS components are loaded. The kernel's memory manager makes those decisions.

In fact, by allocating a RAM disk, more portions of the OS might get paged to disk if too much free RAM is being used up and isn't available for other things.

This program is a waste of time. The OS's memory manager already caches active date in the RAM, including games. There are some very specific niche corner cases to use RAM disks, but games aren't one of them.

 

[BSim500]

I've played around with RAMDisks before and in my experience games which are small enough to fit will typically load quickly from an SSD anyway, whilst the big AAA games which should theoretically benefit the most will often suffer from a lot of non performance related stutter where the engine - not the HDD/SSD - is the bottleneck due to the way games are designed "console first" and little PC optimization is done on the PC port. Often a lot of chronic stutter is cured or greatly reduced with a post-release patch (see DXHR, Bioshock Infinite, etc, where people with i7 + 32GB RAM + SLI rigs were complaining of stutter yet later on post-patching even i3 + 8GB RAM + HD7850 rigs were running much more smoothly than the former pre-patch). Since almost no-one has 64GB RAM in an average domestic gaming rig to stick a whole modern 30-50GB game on, "Intelligent RAMDisks" which cache only the "worst files" will need a great deal of testing / input from developers (or trial & error) on exactly what those files are, and let's be honest - these are the same people who half the time can't even be bothered to finish the PC versions until 2-6 months after release, will happily release them in a half-broken state, and whose "advice" for badly ported mouse support is "buy a console controller" so I'm not exactly holding my breath... :whiste:

Probably the most useful modern recent application for RAMDisk's that I've seen is as a 500-1000MB web browser cache on laptops with slow HDD's (due to the 1,000x increase in perf from 4k files, the worst case for mechanical 2.5" 5,400rpm HDD's) with the option to save the RAMDisk contents to HDD as a single image file when shutting down (and reload when booting), which eliminates the common freezes of switching / opening multiple tabs / reloading cached image heavy pages due to HDD bottleneck. It can make it feel very snappy during usage (though it may increase startup & shutdown times) without the cost of a large SSD (or simply to save write endurance, which also isn't really an issue these days).

Likewise, if you have +16GB RAM (or even 8GB with older games), disabling the swap file has been shown to cure stutter in a number of games (Watch Dogs, etc) without requiring a RAMDisk. (And yes, it's another myth that running without a swap file will cause your PC to burn down your house and eat your children...)

 

[xantub]

I'm more interested in putting a folder in the Ram Disk, for writing. My favorite games are Paradox Strategy games (Europa Universalis 4 and Crusader Kings 2), but playing them in Ironman mode makes it so it saves the game very frequently (to prevent save scumming). Even on my SSD it's slow, so I'd like to use a RAM disk for that (but I only have 8GB ram so guess it won't do much good).

 

[turn_pike]

EU4 dont use -that- much memory. Just make a 1 GB ramdisk before playing EU and link the savegame folder to the ramdisk while playing.

 

[Markbnj]

Seems like Readyboost could do just about the same thing with some tweaking.

 

[AlexAL]

Could this work with Photoshop? Would it allow me to move the photoshop cache to ram?

 

[Denithor]

Could this work with Photoshop? Would it allow me to move the photoshop cache to ram?

I think that's the only useful application for a RAMdisk that I have heard of, create a volume in RAM and place the Photoshop scratch disk there. Super acceleration for that application from what I've heard, although I have no direct experience myself.

 

[Anteaus]

The program is nifty and all, but what about the downside of having to copy files to the RAMDISK in the first place? I think this program is a few years too late. SSDs are becoming more inexpensive by the day, and it has been shown many times that even SSD Raid 0 is shown to have diminishing returns for the average gamer. Load speeds are often limited by the game itself.

As others have said above, I believe there are some non-gaming applications which would benefit from it. As a gamer, outside of very specific games, I don't think the benefits would be tangible beyond what is already accessible with an SSD, which benefits the entire system.

 

[Rakehellion]

Would have been cool a few years ago. RAM is so expensive now though.

Would have been cool a few years ago before everyone had a SSD.

 

[bystander36]

This could work if they offer preconfigured settings for most games. That way the right files get loaded into memory.

 

[AFurryReptile]

Having already purchased an SSD, I see no need for this at all. Games load as fast as they're going to; quite a few simply have poor load time optimization, and no RAMDISK is going to fix that.

That said, I'd definitely worry about corruption with a RAMDISK. The thing that nobody seems to be mentioning is that if you're system crashes while using an application on that disk, the application's state is lost. That's bad news if the game/application was in the middle of saving something. Games aren't written to be run from RAM, and I'd question their ability to recover from a failure like that.

 

[tidy]

.

 

[TheRyuu]

The bolded part makes no sense. A RAM disk program can't control where OS components are loaded. The kernel's memory manager makes those decisions.

In fact, by allocating a RAM disk, more portions of the OS might get paged to disk if too much free RAM is being used up and isn't available for other things.

This program is a waste of time. The OS's memory manager already caches active date in the RAM, including games. There are some very specific niche corner cases to use RAM disks, but games aren't one of them.

This x100000.

If you already have a lot of RAM the operating system's file cache will do what this program was intended (I guess?) to do only without any hacks or additional overhead of marking such RAM as "in use". You only incur the slow media (HDD/SSD) hit once, the first time the file is read. After that it will remain in the file system cache in memory (this is called "Standby" and "Cache" in the Windows task manager) until evicted by either disk activity which is fresh or by a program actually taking up more RAM. Even HDD writes are cached in system RAM as well while they wait to be flushed to the disk so it can't really claim to solve that problem either.

In my opinion this program is trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist and in all likelihood makes thing's worse regardless of what kind of system you have. Please don't use it.

 

[imaheadcase]

Actually the developer who made this is a multiboxer in world of warcraft, he runs 10+ accounts at same time and developed this software because even his SSD was not big enough for all the copies of warcraft installed.

The youtube channel has more videos, but it is really fast loading with this ramdisk software.

This program DOES work for certain applications, games that are bigger than the amount of RAM you have will load a lot faster. For instance some games have 10+ gigs of files just for textures, you can load JUST those into the ramdisk.

Will it work for all situations, of course not. But applications that call on huge amount of files, yes it will.

 

[mikeymikec]

I used to use a modest ramdisk back in the days of XP and Firefox/Thunderbird/OpenOffice's slow cold start times, but a modern HDD on Win7 with SuperFetch almost completely negates that delay IMO.

 

[MiRai]

Actually the developer who made this is a multiboxer in world of warcraft, he runs 10+ accounts at same time and developed this software because even his SSD was not big enough for all the copies of warcraft installed.

The youtube channel has more videos, but it is really fast loading with this ramdisk software.

This program DOES work for certain applications, games that are bigger than the amount of RAM you have will load a lot faster. For instance some games have 10+ gigs of files just for textures, you can load JUST those into the ramdisk.

Will it work for all situations, of course not. But applications that call on huge amount of files, yes it will.

Actually, the "developer" abandoned his multiboxing software and no longer supports it while he continues to sell it. Feel free to check these forums to see how much support is being given out for his product.

After having watched this guy put on a facade and market that software to plenty of people over the years, only to abandon it and everyone with it, makes me steer clear of him and any of his products.

If you really want a RAMDrive there are other alternatives (I personally use Primo RAMDisk), but as fast as SSDs are these days there very little reason to really use them.

 

[mikeymikec]

Could this work with Photoshop? Would it allow me to move the photoshop cache to ram?

Which would result in the photoshop cache being smaller; PS assumes it can utilise up to a certain chunk of available RAM. Your idea is to say to PS, why use normal, faster RAM when you have a system to slow down access through a driver and a file system implementation.

 

[slugg]

Edit: whoops!!! Misread the title!

 

[AFurryReptile]

After having watched this guy put on a facade and market that software to plenty of people over the years, only to abandon it and everyone with it, makes me steer clear of him and any of his products.

This guy was all over Reddit the day that DIMMDrive was on the Steam sale. I saw his ads popping up, he was posting /r/gaming, /r/sysadmin, /r/<insertrandomgamehere>, and he was commenting all over the place. It's obvious that he's in it for the money, and your other comments seem to allude to the same thing.

Plus, you can get similar functionality for totally free, and arguably from better companies. I've used Starwind's version of it before, and it seemed to do the job well.

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/high-performance-ram-disk-emulator

 

[MiRai]

This guy was all over Reddit the day that DIMMDrive was on the Steam sale. I saw his ads popping up, he was posting /r/gaming, /r/sysadmin, /r/<insertrandomgamehere>, and he was commenting all over the place. It's obvious that he's in it for the money, and your other comments seem to allude to the same thing.

That's Tim. While he claims to be a developer, he's not. He's a marketer, plain and simple, and an aggressive one at that. As previously mentioned, he used to multibox World of Warcraft and paid others to develop a program called Pwnboxer. If you look at the YouTube page for that program you can see that every single video description (all 200+ of them) starts with advertising for DimmDrive, and those videos date way back before DimmDrive was even around. Not only that, but he also loves using ClickBank for a referral process, which, in my opinion, just promotes unhealthy advertising because it attracts those who are in it for the referral money rather than giving a genuine review of a product.

I've been part of the multiboxing "scene" (whatever you want to call it) for over five years, but I showed up just after he got himself removed from the main multiboxing community over at dual-boxing.com. That's when he attempted to create his own multiboxing community and software, but during that time I watched this guy throw out lies left and right about other software and developers he was in direct competition with. It worked for a short while on those who had no prior knowledge of who he was, and he'd make claims that people were getting banned for using "X" software or that feature "X" of that software is going to get you banned and that they should use his program instead, but when no one ended up getting banned in <insert MMO here> people began to realize he was full of shit and that his product was sub-par.

There's a bit more that I could say, but I feel that I'm detracting from the actual thread at this point, and I'm not here to create drama. So, either believe what I have to say, or don't, but you're free to buy whatever product you want.