Ramdrive!

[Cormag]

Why can't we do ramdrives anymore? Back in the day I had 128megs of ram on a pentium machine with windows for workgroups. I created a 32meg ramdrive and would copy whatever game I wanted to play into that ramdrive before playing...no load times and smoking fast.

With ram being so cheap these days is there a utility list the old DOS based ramdrive.sys I could use to do this same sort of thing win Windows 7? I could make a 10GB ramdrive and run almost any game out of it.

 

[jlazzaro]

Why can't we do ramdrives anymore?

says who?

 

[Elixer]

Who says we can't do RAM drives ?
There are plenty of results if you look at the search engine of your choice.

 

[Old Hippie]

You paying for it?

 

[Cormag]

Hah! I have been out of the game too long! Apparently a quick search told me all I wanted to know! Thanks guys.

 

[Old Hippie]

Hah! I have been out of the game too long! Apparently a quick search told me all I wanted to know! Thanks guys.

No problem!

AnandTech only charges 1/2 price for questions.

Please pay promptly when the bill arrives.

J/K 🙂

 

[corkyg]

Doesn't Windows 7 create one at the start of the install process?

 

[jhansman]

Nothing preventing you from booting with one, but know it will slow that process down a bit. It would be interesting to see if you could run today's games from a ramdrive.

 

[MarkLuvsCS]

I've used this one before: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk

Cut 4gb of my ram into a ramdrive and it did show up as another drive to install whatever to. I installed Heroes of Newerth to it and loaded the game from there (it's about a 1gb total install). TBH for that game (pretty piss poorly coded with terrible servers) there was no significant improvement in loading. Benchmarks showed around ~2ish GB/s read/write were nearly identical and access times of nil. Sadly didn't try to install any other games to it 🙁. It is free though with very little needed to get it setup.

 

[Blain]

Hah! I have been out of the game too long! Apparently a quick search told me all I wanted to know! Thanks guys.

AltaVista and Magellan aren't the search engines of choice anymore.
Google is what the kids are using these days.

 

[MarkLuvsCS]

AltaVista and Magellan aren't the search engines of choice anymore.
Google is what the kids are using these days.

check out a local ISP website: http://www.strato.net/

They just changed that recently probably 1-2 years ago. I used them for dialup before DSL or cable was available about 10 years ago.