Can I partition my RAM so as it emulates a HDD?

Agent WD40

Agent WD40

Agent WD40

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710
Hi Gents,

I’ve been thinking, which is a highly dangerous and very experimental thing for me, if there is any way in which I can setup my RAM so as I can install an application onto it.

I am currently sporting 4gb of ram over two sticks and am running windows XP. Ideally, I’d like to install eve-online onto my Ram to reduce boot-up times, seeking info etc to reduce any lag in fights.

If this is possible then please let me know how, if I have to re-install windows that isn’t a problem as I could probably benefit from getting rid of a lot of crap I have on my PC!

Ta,

Agent
 
Of course you can!

What you're after is an application that will set up a Ram Disk - we used to use them a lot back in the early days when HDDs were really slow/non existant. I plan to use on extensively on my next build now that the 4x4Gb kits are about.

That link above explains how they work, and there are plenty of free ones about if you google for them. Just remember that RAM is volatile so you need to either just sleep your machine or image the 'virtual drive' so you can easily mount it every time you reboot - I can't wait to have a play myself - Can't stand getting into BF2 servers after all the air assets are taken! ;)
 
cavemanoc said:
Of course you can!

What you're after is an application that will set up a Ram Disk - we used to use them a lot back in the early days when HDDs were really slow/non existant. I plan to use on extensively on my next build now that the 4x4Gb kits are about.

That link above explains how they work, and there are plenty of free ones about if you google for them. Just remember that RAM is volatile so you need to either just sleep your machine or image the 'virtual drive' so you can easily mount it every time you reboot - I can't wait to have a play myself - Can't stand getting into BF2 servers after all the air assets are taken! ;)
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Pretty sound advice and thank you my good man. I shall give that web-page a good reading and look to see if I sould buy in some more ram.

Agent
 
for a game, just buy a faster hard drive and do a fresh install.

a ram drive is not the solution here
 
Whatever happened to those pci cards that you could install ram into and use it as a hard drive? I'm sure i saw a pc with one in recently...
 
for eve online a ramdisk works wonders.

If you have a browse round the eve-o forums; or use eve-search.com to find them there are some good guides. You dont actually need to put the full game onto a ramdisk; you can use symlinks or ntfs mount points to just put the cache files etc onto the ramdisk; which still gives you the rapid loading required.

be warned though; this doesnt solve the extreme module lag in fleet fights as thats usually server side :s
 
Netvyper said:
for eve online a ramdisk works wonders.

If you have a browse round the eve-o forums; or use eve-search.com to find them there are some good guides. You dont actually need to put the full game onto a ramdisk; you can use symlinks or ntfs mount points to just put the cache files etc onto the ramdisk; which still gives you the rapid loading required.

be warned though; this doesnt solve the extreme module lag in fleet fights as thats usually server side :s
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Cool! Will have a search around.

As for lag on the server side, your 100% right! The easiest way to get around it is to get someone in your fleet who is in local to petition being stuck. That normally gets the GMs attention strait away and they tend to reinforce the node... ;)

However, the solutions thus far seem to be very interesting so thank you all. Looks like I have a lot of reading to do..

Agent.
 
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MikeHunt79 said:
Hmm, my windows directory is 600MB, I may try running it from a ramdrive.
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How?

Bearing in mind a Ramdisk will be wiped every time you switch the power off, you can't image the windows directory into the ramdrive until you have an OS started and then you can't restart to use it because you'll wipe it again.

Unless you wrote a really funky bootloader to sit underneath windows, create your ramdrive and restore an image to it then boot from it. That would be a nice bit of work, I wonder if it's been done...
 
bigredshark said:
How?

Bearing in mind a Ramdisk will be wiped every time you switch the power off, you can't image the windows directory into the ramdrive until you have an OS started and then you can't restart to use it because you'll wipe it again.

Unless you wrote a really funky bootloader to sit underneath windows, create your ramdrive and restore an image to it then boot from it. That would be a nice bit of work, I wonder if it's been done...
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Would that then be noticeably faster than just installing the OS on a SCSI or Raptor HDD?
 
bigredshark said:
Bearing in mind a Ramdisk will be wiped every time you switch the power off.
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You can get ramdisks that save and load images these days, as for loading the OS with a RAM disk that would be awesome! Yeah that would be a very fancy bootloader indeed!

peterattheboro said:
Unless you wrote a really funky bootloader to sit underneath windows, create your ramdrive and restore an image to it then boot from it. That would be a nice bit of work, I wonder if it's been done...
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Well whats the read/write speed of current ram? quite fast id think, HDD read write speed is only circa 100MB/s so i can imagine a RAM disk that would be 10x faster? does that sound silly?
 
Years ago I did run a cut-down Quakeworld installation from a RAMdrive for a short while. It seemed like a good idea at the time but in the end I got fed up with stuff like having to take backups of any recorded demos / screenshots etc before restarting my PC.

The other issue to consider is the fact that you'll have to actually 'fill' the RAMdrive each time you boot. Although you can automate this, it will still take time, due to the fact that it'll have to copy all the data off a normal hd anyway.

Theoretically those on Vista with plenty of RAM should see less of a gain from RAMdrives since superfetch should be caching commonly used files anyway.
 
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