AMD Pitches Free RAMDisk Trial

[Guest]

AMD has begun promoting its partnership with Ramdisk, a developer of memory solutions as well as the Ramdisk Software, which enables PC users to allocate RAM as a virtual RAM drive.

AMD Pitches Free RAMDisk Trial : Read more

 

[Warsaw]

Sweet none-the-less, good job on promoting something that is a huge speed boost in some instances.

 

[amuffin]

Well, it's a start. We'll get there one day.

 

[uglynerdman]

but will it help you run crysis?

 

[joytech22]

If you have a server, stick 256GB of RAM on the mobo, make a 128GB RAM Drive.
Store all your game servers on the drive.

Watch as nobody complains about performance or map load times. :3 Until a power outage wipes it clean and you lose your servers. lol.


Whenever I play online I boast about how the server loads slower than my machine does.
But if someone did this, I'd be dumbfounded by the load times. lol.

 

[Robert Pankiw]

I understand that a lot of people on here are gamers, but, wouldn't this help people who do a lot of picture editing? Use the RAMDISK as your scratch partition, it gets saved to hard disk (or SSD) infrequently, letting your drive last longer. Of course I assume you are using either an UPS or a laptop so not even power outage would really effect your work. RAMDISK would allow you to load large movies much faster too, wouldn't it? Maybe we can see how much faster an application works with RAMDISK? (Obviously synthetics would be leaps ahead, so real world testing could be nice.)

 

[Onihikage]

This article is ironic for me. I've been using the normal trial of RAMDisk to run Firefox for a few weeks now, but ultimately decided to stop using it because everything started to freeze and stutter worse than it ever had from my HDD. Yet after moving Firefox to my HDD, this article is literally the first thing I see when I start it up again and go to my feeds.

I don't know why I had issues with RAMDisk, perhaps a driver or hardware issue. Whatever it was, I can live without RAMDisk for a while (at least until I scrape together the money for an SSD).

 

[merikafyeah]

I prefer Primo Ramdisk. It's very stable, and I find that its driver is more efficient than others, which you can tell by benchmarking your ramdisk drives with software like Anvil's SSD benchmark.

 

[Firion87]

Tried it on my laptop. Doesn't seem to give me any speed bump for games at all (DDR3@1033MHz). Ain't gonna try it on my pc, because I got there a ssd installed.

 

[martel80]

20 bucks for a RAM drive SW in 2012??? Is that some kind of a joke?

 

[goodguy713]

[citation][nom]Firion87[/nom]Tried it on my laptop. Doesn't seem to give me any speed bump for games at all (DDR3@1033MHz). Ain't gonna try it on my pc, because I got there a ssd installed.[/citation]


It might load a game even faster then an ssd drive but with out a decent graphics card its pointless not to mention your direct x files are stored in a seperate folder so installing a game on a ram disk is rather hard to do ..

 

[Firion87]

[citation][nom]goodguy713[/nom][/citation]
ahhhh, got it. Didn't know that. Thanks!

 

[hp79]

I also tried one of these RAMDisk software couple months back. I removed it because it was causing more problems than adding any benefits. This was for both desktop and laptop with SSD.

 

[The_Prophecy]

I use Primo RAMDisk on my main desktop with 64GB of ram and load Diablo 3, Guild Wars 2, and Star Trek Online into it (not all at once though). Very noticeable difference in load times when running these games from the ram drive. As a free alternative, ImDisk works very well too. No size limit under 64 Bit operating systems with ImDisk either.

 

[techcurious]

I think since the introduction of SSD, RAMDisks are not as useful given their small size (unless you invest in gobs of RAM) and volatility.

 

[teodoreh]

Damn, I had RAMDisk on my Amiga before 1.5 decade! Who knows, after 40 years they may discover localize and HAM too!

 

[teodoreh]

...and Rexx too!

 

[memadmax]

[citation][nom]joytech22[/nom]If you have a server, stick 256GB of RAM on the mobo, make a 128GB RAM Drive.Store all your game servers on the drive.Watch as nobody complains about performance or map load times. :3 Until a power outage wipes it clean and you lose your servers. lol.Whenever I play online I boast about how the server loads slower than my machine does.But if someone did this, I'd be dumbfounded by the load times. lol.[/citation]

If ur running servers like this then you will have UPS and battery backed up RAM(the RAM maintains it's contents and refresh until power is restored)

 

[billgatez]

Arent there tones of free RAM disks around thet go over 4 GB.
Id like to also see a RAM drive that mirror's the data to a drive. so there's a back up.

 

[merikafyeah]

[citation][nom]billgatez[/nom]Arent there tones of free RAM disks around thet go over 4 GB. Id like to also see a RAM drive that mirror's the data to a drive. so there's a back up.[/citation]
Primo Ramdisk has image mirroring so you never have to worry about power outages wiping your data. In addition to automatically loading your ramdisk data at startup, it has options to update the mirror at an interval of your choosing, or you can choose realtime mirroring.

 

[digiex]

The problem of windows, it has lots of locations of virtual storage, Pagefile, temp in the profiles folder, temp file in the windows directory, other programs put their temp storage it in their profiles folder, and its pain in the ass to unify all the temp locations, and some programs don't run if you change their temp storage.

 

[Regor245]

Hey guys do you think it will help load textures faster in GTA IV?

btw, i have 4gb+2gb, I'll set Ram Drive size to 2gb.

 

[waxdart]

[citation][nom]Regor245[/nom]Hey guys do you think it will help load textures faster in GTA IV?btw, i have 4gb+2gb, I'll set Ram Drive size to 2gb.[/citation]
I don't think I'd bother with that amount of ram in the system. 4gb for windows 7 to run well and you've only 2 left over for the game to run in a normal way. To add mirrored HDD files on top would limit things. But that doesn't mean you can't slim down Window's footprint and give it a try. It's half the fun.

Just so you know, I put an 256gb SSD in my machine and have been playing Black Mesa (Half-Life remake). The load times in that are slower than new titles. So if game isn't optimized you'll still have to wait.

Could I put my steam folder into a ImDisk RAM drive? Hmm

 

[falchard]

Uhh, you don't store data on a RamDisk, you store an instance of a program so you can execute it fast. You save any data to a hard disk. For instance, a 32bit game can only use 2GB of memory. The game is 6GB large, so when you are loading a new cell or level, it has to clear the previous 1 GB of data currently in memory and load 1GB from the hard disk at 100MB/s. So you are looking at a 10 second load in this scenario. With RamDisk, you can load the entire program into memory so it takes a fraction of a second to load a new level. Going into 64-bit apps, loading in large amounts of data from a large program can take a hile, and this will speed it up significantly.

 

[luciferano]

[citation][nom]The_Prophecy[/nom]I use Primo RAMDisk on my main desktop with 64GB of ram and load Diablo 3, Guild Wars 2, and Star Trek Online into it (not all at once though). Very noticeable difference in load times when running these games from the ram drive. As a free alternative, ImDisk works very well too. No size limit under 64 Bit operating systems with ImDisk either.[/citation]

I use IMDisk. It can make greater than 4GB RAM drives even on 32 bit operating systems.