Scoob
New member
Hi all,
I’ve been pondering the benefits of RamDrives, considering memory is relatively cheap these days. Did some playing around, creating small 1 to 4gb ram drives on my Gateway PC which has 8gb total Ram. I popped a load of my commonly used applications in there and found it quite nice how quickly (i.e. instantly) they launched. The only “cost” was a simple batch command to create & load my Ramdisk in the first place.
I moved on to loading up some game Demos into a Ramdisk – I didn’t have enough Ram to try full games, but thought this’d be a good starting place. Now, it’s a niche title, but I’m a fan of the “X” games by Egosoft so I loaded up their rolling demo. I was impressed by how reduced the loading time between the various scenes in the demo appeared. Not instant, as of course there’s still a degree of processing involved to decompress textures etc. but darn quick.
I did various benchmark tests, copying stuff back and forth and of course anything going to/from the RamDrive was only as slow as the device it went from/to as you’d expect.
So, I decided to expand the experiment a little. Me and a mate went halfs on 32gb (4x8gb) DIMMs – about £180 all in with postage etc. for 1600mhz 10-10-10-27 DDR3 Corsair Vengeance. My Gamer currently has 2x4gb 1600mhz 9-9-9-24 Corsair Vengeance.
Memory arrived, I popped it in the system as 8-4-8-4 left to right in the motherboard. Oddly XMP defaulted ALL the ram to run at the tighter 9-9-9-24 timings, rather than the lowest common of 10-10-10-27. Odd & I suspect a potential problem waiting the happen there. Still, let’s leave it how the motherboard thinks it should be for the moment.
I boot up and the POST screen shows 24gb ram – nice. Windows loads and windows too sees 24gb. I run some memory bandwidth tests using the built-in (Windows 7 Ultimate) command line tool WinSat – “winsat /mem” from the command line does a simple memory bandwidth test. Mine reported just shy of 22gB/s – somewhat faster than a mechanical hard drive!
The reason for performing this test was because my friend had issues getting his ram working with his existing 8gb initially. When he finally got it working certain tools reported his ram as running in dual-channel mode when I suspected it was not based on the Ram configuration he described. He pointed at all these tools (CPUz, HWInfo and others) showing his ram as “dual channel” but I reminded him that a lot of tools simply report what the system supports rather than what it’s doing. After some arguing we both ran tests using WinSat, when he saw my bandwidth score was DOUBLE his he admitted that…well, he admitted nothing but swapped his memory around to the correct configuration so it actually worked as dual channel lol.
So, back on topic proper, I now have 24gb of ram. After some further testing I got a Blue Screen – not something I ever see outside of overclocking experiments. It was a BCCode 50 which points to memory. Not entirely unexpected as the motherboard had used tighter timings than the ram supported. I popped into the BIOS, manually set the memory timings to 10-10-10-27 and all has been fine since.
Right, I have 24gb, massive overkill normally but not if you want a 16gb Ramdisk!
I’d played around with a few ramdisk tools, however none had a free 64 bit version – i.e. they were all limited to 4gb only unless I paid money. I was close to paying DataRam for their 64bit RamDisk product as I’d been using the free (4gb only) version for my earlier testing, I then however found ImDisk, a totally free and open-source 64bit RamDisk tool. It’s not quite as friendly as DataRam’s product, but has some powerful command line functions that have proven most useful.
So, I create myself a 12gb Ramdisk initially as I’m testing with my “X” game – X3 Albion Prelude to be exact. The game install, along with the various mods I run, comes to just shy of 10gb in all. I initially just drag and drop the game folder into my RamDisk as (due to having an *official* Steam-free .exe) I can run the game install from anywhere.
Running the game… Well, it loads a lot quicker, though I still see that the CPU is loaded doing “stuff” with the data preparing the game. Once in-game things feel more fluid, traversing sectors (it’s a space game) means the game has to load all assets needed by the new sector , is much quicker. It’s not instant as the CPU still has work to do here. Anyway, successful test with a marked improvement in my gameplay experience.
Now, on to Skyrim. Skyrim, as long as Steam is running, doesn’t seem to care where it’s run from. Good job really as I always create a new instance of the game for each patch. My Skyrim install is about 12gb, I use various texture packs and mods to pretty up the game. I also use uGrid=9 as well as other .ini file settings to further enhance things. Game has always played quite well (early bugs aside) but still suffers from stutter as objects are loaded – especially if I’m sprinting or riding a horse so the game is traversing grids quickly. Additionally area and inside/outside (basically cellchange ) transitions aren’t that quick as I use a mechanical hdd.
So, Skyrim is on the RamDrive…let’s go. Game is up and running (including loading my save from mechanical HDD) very quickly – I should have timed it before and after really! I’m now in-game and running around like a loon. I’m a high-level character so I can sprint for ages. I’m running across the landscape as fast as I can but I’m getting NO JUDDER as assets are loaded. Nice. I’m also playing with a mod that lets me (at my very high level) conjure a near-infinite amount of summons. I can summon groups of three skeletons each time and just keep spawning until I hit 60+ - all happens smoothly and stutter-free. Very good
I next despatch the Skeleton army I’d created and start testing fast-travel (area transitions) these happen again very very quickly, really, there’s not even time to really break your immersion (can I still use that word for Skyrim?) in the game world. Really, an excellent improvement overall.
I later get into a fight with many varied creatures - all which fight among themselves as well as with me so lots of spells flying around with associated spell effects...all happening flawlessly!
I actually ended up running around in Skyrim for the next three hours, having not played it much lately at all – a testament to how much improved things were.
So, I have Skyrim in a RamDisk, like I had X3AP in there beforehand – but obviously it’s all lost once I power down. Now ImDisk does have the option to both save an image of its self as well as (of course) load from a previously saved image. I played around with this and while it works fine it’s not that quick. As a further test I decided to create some scripts that would both create a RamDisk of the appropriate size and then copy (using RoboCopy) the relevant game folder into the drive. As I have my base installs of ALL my games on hard drive of course, those are where I copy from – they are my masters if you like.
So now, all I need do is power on my PC, decide what game I’d like to play, click the icon I created to launch the scripts and wait. To copy 10gb to my ramdisk takes less that 3 minutes from my mechanical hard drive – I can use that time to make a cuppa (or more likely have a pee) in preparation for my gaming session. Considering those three minutes give me much improved play time it’s well worth it…and having an empty bladder is good too!
So, £90 dropped on an additional 16gb of ram – definitely worth it so far. The only issue I can see is where games do not like being moved from their install location. I guess many newer titles that are still locked down by overly intrusive DRM are not going to be candidates to run from a ram-drive. However, more and more developers appear to be releasing DRM-free updates once a title is a little older. I know Egosoft do it, and Steam games have the option to be a little less locked down and run from anywhere as long as the .exe can confirm the client is running. Skyrim works this way, though oddly X3AP did not – hence the dev giving us a Steam-free option I assume. I guess things would need to be tested on a game-by-game basis. I have a fairly limited selections of games, none newer than Skyrim or X3AP – both which came out the end of last year – yet they work. Not sure if the likes of Battlefield 3 could be made to run from elsewhere.
What could be done is to directly install the games to the RamDisk then use ImDisks tools to save the image. As long as the drive is up and the image loaded when you try to run it I’d hope things would be fine. You could make it a window start-up option easily enough. It’s worth noting that it’d be possibly to “break” the install by running a registry clean up tool such as CCleaner when the drive is NOT mounted however as it will doubtless see lots of entries as invalid as the destination folder doesn’t exist until mounted, so to speak.
One final thing. We did have some concerns regarding additional CPU load from managing the RamDisk service. My friend initially had some problems with very high CPU usage, however that turned out to be the software for his keyboard misbehaving of all things. In my own monitoring the RamDisk service appears to use zero CPU resources in effect…though it does have a 16gb memory footprint lol.
So, there you have it. RamDisks are back lol. My gaming has been improved, plus it was a fun mini-project playing around. Me and a friend did this after a "down the pub" type discussion into, initially, the benefits of SSDs - but we took it a step further lol.
Cheers,
Scoob.
Quite concise for me, don't you think?
I’ve been pondering the benefits of RamDrives, considering memory is relatively cheap these days. Did some playing around, creating small 1 to 4gb ram drives on my Gateway PC which has 8gb total Ram. I popped a load of my commonly used applications in there and found it quite nice how quickly (i.e. instantly) they launched. The only “cost” was a simple batch command to create & load my Ramdisk in the first place.
I moved on to loading up some game Demos into a Ramdisk – I didn’t have enough Ram to try full games, but thought this’d be a good starting place. Now, it’s a niche title, but I’m a fan of the “X” games by Egosoft so I loaded up their rolling demo. I was impressed by how reduced the loading time between the various scenes in the demo appeared. Not instant, as of course there’s still a degree of processing involved to decompress textures etc. but darn quick.
I did various benchmark tests, copying stuff back and forth and of course anything going to/from the RamDrive was only as slow as the device it went from/to as you’d expect.
So, I decided to expand the experiment a little. Me and a mate went halfs on 32gb (4x8gb) DIMMs – about £180 all in with postage etc. for 1600mhz 10-10-10-27 DDR3 Corsair Vengeance. My Gamer currently has 2x4gb 1600mhz 9-9-9-24 Corsair Vengeance.
Memory arrived, I popped it in the system as 8-4-8-4 left to right in the motherboard. Oddly XMP defaulted ALL the ram to run at the tighter 9-9-9-24 timings, rather than the lowest common of 10-10-10-27. Odd & I suspect a potential problem waiting the happen there. Still, let’s leave it how the motherboard thinks it should be for the moment.
I boot up and the POST screen shows 24gb ram – nice. Windows loads and windows too sees 24gb. I run some memory bandwidth tests using the built-in (Windows 7 Ultimate) command line tool WinSat – “winsat /mem” from the command line does a simple memory bandwidth test. Mine reported just shy of 22gB/s – somewhat faster than a mechanical hard drive!
The reason for performing this test was because my friend had issues getting his ram working with his existing 8gb initially. When he finally got it working certain tools reported his ram as running in dual-channel mode when I suspected it was not based on the Ram configuration he described. He pointed at all these tools (CPUz, HWInfo and others) showing his ram as “dual channel” but I reminded him that a lot of tools simply report what the system supports rather than what it’s doing. After some arguing we both ran tests using WinSat, when he saw my bandwidth score was DOUBLE his he admitted that…well, he admitted nothing but swapped his memory around to the correct configuration so it actually worked as dual channel lol.
So, back on topic proper, I now have 24gb of ram. After some further testing I got a Blue Screen – not something I ever see outside of overclocking experiments. It was a BCCode 50 which points to memory. Not entirely unexpected as the motherboard had used tighter timings than the ram supported. I popped into the BIOS, manually set the memory timings to 10-10-10-27 and all has been fine since.
Right, I have 24gb, massive overkill normally but not if you want a 16gb Ramdisk!
I’d played around with a few ramdisk tools, however none had a free 64 bit version – i.e. they were all limited to 4gb only unless I paid money. I was close to paying DataRam for their 64bit RamDisk product as I’d been using the free (4gb only) version for my earlier testing, I then however found ImDisk, a totally free and open-source 64bit RamDisk tool. It’s not quite as friendly as DataRam’s product, but has some powerful command line functions that have proven most useful.
So, I create myself a 12gb Ramdisk initially as I’m testing with my “X” game – X3 Albion Prelude to be exact. The game install, along with the various mods I run, comes to just shy of 10gb in all. I initially just drag and drop the game folder into my RamDisk as (due to having an *official* Steam-free .exe) I can run the game install from anywhere.
Running the game… Well, it loads a lot quicker, though I still see that the CPU is loaded doing “stuff” with the data preparing the game. Once in-game things feel more fluid, traversing sectors (it’s a space game) means the game has to load all assets needed by the new sector , is much quicker. It’s not instant as the CPU still has work to do here. Anyway, successful test with a marked improvement in my gameplay experience.
Now, on to Skyrim. Skyrim, as long as Steam is running, doesn’t seem to care where it’s run from. Good job really as I always create a new instance of the game for each patch. My Skyrim install is about 12gb, I use various texture packs and mods to pretty up the game. I also use uGrid=9 as well as other .ini file settings to further enhance things. Game has always played quite well (early bugs aside) but still suffers from stutter as objects are loaded – especially if I’m sprinting or riding a horse so the game is traversing grids quickly. Additionally area and inside/outside (basically cellchange ) transitions aren’t that quick as I use a mechanical hdd.
So, Skyrim is on the RamDrive…let’s go. Game is up and running (including loading my save from mechanical HDD) very quickly – I should have timed it before and after really! I’m now in-game and running around like a loon. I’m a high-level character so I can sprint for ages. I’m running across the landscape as fast as I can but I’m getting NO JUDDER as assets are loaded. Nice. I’m also playing with a mod that lets me (at my very high level) conjure a near-infinite amount of summons. I can summon groups of three skeletons each time and just keep spawning until I hit 60+ - all happens smoothly and stutter-free. Very good
I next despatch the Skeleton army I’d created and start testing fast-travel (area transitions) these happen again very very quickly, really, there’s not even time to really break your immersion (can I still use that word for Skyrim?) in the game world. Really, an excellent improvement overall.
I later get into a fight with many varied creatures - all which fight among themselves as well as with me so lots of spells flying around with associated spell effects...all happening flawlessly!
I actually ended up running around in Skyrim for the next three hours, having not played it much lately at all – a testament to how much improved things were.
So, I have Skyrim in a RamDisk, like I had X3AP in there beforehand – but obviously it’s all lost once I power down. Now ImDisk does have the option to both save an image of its self as well as (of course) load from a previously saved image. I played around with this and while it works fine it’s not that quick. As a further test I decided to create some scripts that would both create a RamDisk of the appropriate size and then copy (using RoboCopy) the relevant game folder into the drive. As I have my base installs of ALL my games on hard drive of course, those are where I copy from – they are my masters if you like.
So now, all I need do is power on my PC, decide what game I’d like to play, click the icon I created to launch the scripts and wait. To copy 10gb to my ramdisk takes less that 3 minutes from my mechanical hard drive – I can use that time to make a cuppa (or more likely have a pee) in preparation for my gaming session. Considering those three minutes give me much improved play time it’s well worth it…and having an empty bladder is good too!
So, £90 dropped on an additional 16gb of ram – definitely worth it so far. The only issue I can see is where games do not like being moved from their install location. I guess many newer titles that are still locked down by overly intrusive DRM are not going to be candidates to run from a ram-drive. However, more and more developers appear to be releasing DRM-free updates once a title is a little older. I know Egosoft do it, and Steam games have the option to be a little less locked down and run from anywhere as long as the .exe can confirm the client is running. Skyrim works this way, though oddly X3AP did not – hence the dev giving us a Steam-free option I assume. I guess things would need to be tested on a game-by-game basis. I have a fairly limited selections of games, none newer than Skyrim or X3AP – both which came out the end of last year – yet they work. Not sure if the likes of Battlefield 3 could be made to run from elsewhere.
What could be done is to directly install the games to the RamDisk then use ImDisks tools to save the image. As long as the drive is up and the image loaded when you try to run it I’d hope things would be fine. You could make it a window start-up option easily enough. It’s worth noting that it’d be possibly to “break” the install by running a registry clean up tool such as CCleaner when the drive is NOT mounted however as it will doubtless see lots of entries as invalid as the destination folder doesn’t exist until mounted, so to speak.
One final thing. We did have some concerns regarding additional CPU load from managing the RamDisk service. My friend initially had some problems with very high CPU usage, however that turned out to be the software for his keyboard misbehaving of all things. In my own monitoring the RamDisk service appears to use zero CPU resources in effect…though it does have a 16gb memory footprint lol.
So, there you have it. RamDisks are back lol. My gaming has been improved, plus it was a fun mini-project playing around. Me and a friend did this after a "down the pub" type discussion into, initially, the benefits of SSDs - but we took it a step further lol.
Cheers,
Scoob.
Quite concise for me, don't you think?
R 
