RamDisks and Games

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Hey guys, looking into setting up a ram disk for loading games, but no point installing a whole game to it, is there anyway to use a ramdisk to just load maps and that ?

also is it possible to use it for windows booting ?

and how about firefox ?
 
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Soldato
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Hey guys, looking into setting up a ram disk for loading games, but no point installing a whole game to it, is there anyway to use a ramdisk to just load maps and that ?

also is it possible to use it for windows booting ?

and how about firefox ?

I know people use them for firefox, but i think your other plans could have problems... how will you tell the game where to look for the map? and the fact it will be deleted each time you reboot will surly be a problem for installing windows on? I'm not even sure how you could set up the ram disk before installing windows...
 
Soldato
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Indeed, You're aware its volatile memory and will be wiped clean on reboot!? RAMdisks are generally used for things of a temporary nature, Pagefiles, scratchpads, Temporary internet files or Temp files in general.

Things that can be wiped clean. They're fantastic to run along side an SSD.
 
Man of Honour
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Yes its possible using filesystem links/junction points however your still going to have to upload the data to the RAM disk again after every reboot so the advantage is somewhat diminished.
 
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You can have an application save the ramdisk to hdd/ssd and reload it on boot.

Means you don't have to worry about reboots wiping it, alternatively don't turn off the pc.
 
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I use rsync, on load I just sync the game I want to play to my ramdisk. On shutdown the folder is synced back to my SSD. rsync here does full read to ramdisk, when shutting down only syncs changed files back to SSD therefore limiting writes.

The only downside is the initial wait while I tx the game to ramdisk from the SSD, oh and my ramdisk is 32GB so I copy the entire game
 
Soldato
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Pagefile in ram is just circular though? I wrote it earlier. But in error lol. Page file is used by the os when the ram is full, so allocating it to a ram disk would surely be pointless? For instance. 8GB ram. With a 4GB pagefile stored on the ram disk and 4GB standard and useable. why have it use the ram disk? get rid and it'd use all 8gb memory instead of needing to write to a page file.
 
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Man of Honour
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Not sure about Windows 7 but IIRC in earlier versions of windows you couldn't allocate pagefiles to non-permanent/removable storage without an OS hack. (it would failover on bootup and automatically create a dynamic one on the root of your C: drive due to the system initalising RAM discs and removable storage after the kernel had started).
 
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Soldato
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Apologies, I mentioned that because BF3 arbitrarily allocates data to pagefile even with enough RAM about, but the effects of this are probably negligible. The only way to make maps load quicker would be to install BF3 on some kind of SSD.
 
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wbt i turned off paging file like 5 months ago..... BF3 skyrim and all other games run with no problems.....
No point of doing ramdrive for paging file just turn paging file off and see if you got any stability problems ect
 
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