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Evan
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RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 11:35 am

Hi everyone,

I made what could be considered a rash eBay purchase the other day of a Dell Precision T7500 with dual Xeon X5690 CPUs and 192GB of memory, the idea being that not only is it an improvement over my current rig (Xeon W3680 with 24GB), but it has such an obnoxious amount of RAM that I can create a 128GB RAMdrive in which I can install whatever game I want to play and not have to wait very long for anything. I'll be running Windows 10 Pro on it (64-bit, of course), and I wanted to ask: does anyone have a recommendation for good RAMdrive software that supports Windows 10 and can create large drives? I do see a few options around, but ideally it would be nice to have some feedback from people who might have used them. I did order a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB to use as the main drive for the system, so I'm thinking I'll use my old 160GB Intel SSD as the storage for the RAMdrive, since the system is going to be on most of the time, but I'd prefer not use use any of the main SSD for storing the RAMdrive's image file. Ideally, I'd want the software to be able to write out its image to disk on demand or on a schedule, instead of just doing it when I'm shutting the RAMdrive down, but I don't know if any RAMdrive software has that option. Any input is appreciated, thanks in advance!
 
Spyder22446688
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 11:42 am

I am afraid I don't have any suggestions, just wanted to chime in that I think what you are proposing to do sounds REALLY cool, never heard of somebody with 192GB of RAM, and using the old Intel X25 SSD as an image drive sounds brilliant.

I look forward to hearing about the results. Bonus points will be awarded for screenshots. Good luck.
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RAGEPRO
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 11:43 am

So the webpage is shady and the software is relatively ancient (XP-era), but I use RAMdisk "Enterprise" from WinRAMTech, formerly known as QSOFT. It's consistently the fastest of the Windows RAMdisk softwares I've used, and it's also very powerful and easy to configure. There's a free trial.

Windows has some built-in RAMdisk functionality but I don't know how well it works these days. I used it back in the Windows 2000 era, though.
 
liquidsquid
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 11:54 am

I thought Windows 10 was smart enough to cache your once accessed files into Ram, negating the need to do such a thing? Once accessed frequently enough, it is supposed to load files upon startup into memory for faster access. I would say do some testing ahead of time, or look into making the OS work the way it was designed rather than going old-school with a RAM disk.

Perhaps write a script that will preemptively touch the files you want to access quickly ahead of time to get the OS to load them into RAM for later faster access?
 
RAGEPRO
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 11:59 am

liquidsquid wrote:
I thought Windows 10 was smart enough to cache your once accessed files into Ram, negating the need to do such a thing? Once accessed frequently enough, it is supposed to load files upon startup into memory for faster access. I would say do some testing ahead of time, or look into making the OS work the way it was designed rather than going old-school with a RAM disk.

Perhaps write a script that will preemptively touch the files you want to access quickly ahead of time to get the OS to load them into RAM for later faster access?

I don't know why Windows still goes to disk every time, but it does. You can load an application a hundred times and it will still go to disk on the 101st launch. Having things on a RAMdisk makes them an order of magnitude faster.

I have 32GB of RAM and I frequently use a 16GB RAMdisk for launching a few games where load time/avoiding stutters are paramount.
 
Duct Tape Dude
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 12:29 pm

I tried AMD's RAMDrive for a bit, which is just the rebranded version of DataRAM RAMDisk. Persisting to disk periodically worked fine for me, but the max size is 64GB. I don't know if you can create multiple RAMDisks of 64GB each or something.

I very much approve of your rash purchases. Sounds like an awesome setup regardless of electricity costs!
 
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 1:34 pm

I really have to wonder whether you'll see a meaningful difference over just using the SSD to store the game directly. Loading time of some games is limited by the CPU (due to decompression of game assets), not raw I/O speed. RAMDisk isn't going to help if that's the case, and conceivably could even hurt, since the "disk" reads now involve the CPU to move the data (instead of using hardware DMA), and consume additional DRAM bandwidth.
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CScottG
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 2:02 pm

 
Dieter
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 2:04 pm

Edit:  Well, just looked carefully at the link I provided, and they're now on version 4, which is apparently not free.  Older versions were free (for personal use) and worked well, so see if you can find them.  I was running 3.x something, if I remember.

Original post:
I had good luck with SoftPerfect's RAMDisk.

https://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/

It's a little clunky to setup and configure, and I did persistent storage (so it had to read/write at each boot/restart), but it was stable, crazy fast, and worked fine on Win7, Win8.1, and Win10.  Also, unlike a lot of other ramdisk products out there, I don't think there's a limit on size for free (I only have 32GB RAM, not 192!), but I was running an 8GB drive no problem.

I set the ramdisk to be my temp folder and browser cache folders.  When I finally updated to Win10 from 8.1, I didn't bother with the RAMdisk, as I wasn't seeing any huge difference in usable speed, but I had also acquired a faster SSD than before.  But, I never had stability problems or crashes.

But they sure are fun to look at the numbers (this is from Win8.1, and I've since replaced by RAID1 setup with different software and drives, and also have a different SSD).  For reference (and making an SSD look crazy slow).   :-)

2TB RAID1 (Intel Software RAID), Toshiba 2TB 7.2k disks:
Image

Samsung 830:
Image

4GB SoftPerfect RAMDisk (using the "slower" compatible mode):
Image
 
maxxcool
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 2:20 pm

I would try the AMD ram drive.  64GB should be enough to PoC with 1 game and move the game folder in and out to run other games on the 64GB ram space.
*IF* the AMD software supports more than one drive at a time,  just raid them together. 

**BUT** ram drives are CPU intensive.  error correction, calculating write crc, actual writing, calculating the next block to be written too are all normally done by dedicated hardware AISC/FGPA's.  you might not see the dramatic boost you are expecting because of overhead adding to latency waiting on generic x86 cores emulating a disk controller.

on the other hand.. if you play SWTOR,  I think it would help a ton ;)
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CScottG
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 2:35 pm

Latency should be an order of magnitude better than the best SSD - which is its main draw.

For the most part what a RAM drive should do is provide a "smoother" experience, not a "faster" experience.  In fact when you add-up the load times from Drive to RAM Drive you are often adding additional time to your game loads (unless you leave your computer on all the time with the game loaded up to the RAM Drive).

Perhaps a more beneficial (if more "precarious") solution would be a very large BLOCK RAM buffer as cache for the entire system - encompassing everything about the OS into RAM:

https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/

This would of course shift the increase in load times to the initial boot of the OS, but after that everything should run a bit smoother.  ..until of course you suffer a power outage. :o  But that's what UPS's are for, yes? :P
 
rayleech
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 02, 2016 2:50 pm

We also use SoftPerfect's RamDisk (https://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/). We did a 9-month trail w/ v3 on our pre-production machines and it worked flawlessly! It was the highest performing one we tested, giving us anywhere from 8.5 G/s to 10.1 G/s sequential, and 4k Random around 1.6G/s (read) and 1.25G/s (write) sustained. We'll be upgrading to v4 before we deploy the machines to production.

Raymond.cc had a great article we used when trying to select software. The article is a little old, but is still probably worth a look.
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/12-ram-disk ... ite-speed/
 
Flying Fox
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Sat Dec 03, 2016 1:47 pm

Don't you need to "load" the data from your SSD/HDD onto the RAM drive to begin with? That would be "slow enough". And then you need to make sure that the system is up all the time, which will not be the case when Windows 10 reboots automagically after updates (yes, you can try to disable and that's a bit tricky to begin with). To me this seems to be more trouble than it is worth just to load a game or two faster. There are better uses for 192 gigs of RAM.
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Evan
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Sun Dec 04, 2016 12:22 am

Duct Tape Dude wrote:
I tried AMD's RAMDrive for a bit, which is just the rebranded version of DataRAM RAMDisk. Persisting to disk periodically worked fine for me, but the max size is 64GB. I don't know if you can create multiple RAMDisks of 64GB each or something.

I very much approve of your rash purchases. Sounds like an awesome setup regardless of electricity costs!

I tried Radeon RAMDisk a while ago with my current rig, and stopped using it - I forget why, but I think it had to do with stability. I gave it another try again later after having forgotten why I'd given up on it before, and then stopped again after encountering the same problem again. Maybe they have a newer version that's more stable (I tried it years ago under Windows 7), but I'm inclined to try another one.
Oh, and I do have solar panels, so electricity costs are not as much of a concern. :)
 
Evan
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Sun Dec 04, 2016 12:28 am

Flying Fox wrote:
Don't you need to "load" the data from your SSD/HDD onto the RAM drive to begin with?  That would be "slow enough".  And then you need to make sure that the system is up all the time, which will not be the case when Windows 10 reboots automagically after updates (yes, you can try to disable and that's a bit tricky to begin with).  To me this seems to be more trouble than it is worth just to load a game or two faster.  There are better uses for 192 gigs of RAM.

Yes, it would have to load up the image after each reboot (and save it before shutdown, of course), but I do plan to have the system on all the time (crunching Folding@home work units). I'll have to look into how to get Windows 10 not to automatically reboot after an update, that was a concern I had.
 
Kougar
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Fri Dec 09, 2016 8:49 pm

I'm not convinced a RAMdrive is better than say, a Samsung 960 Pro. Things like Windows Defender or A/Vs are going to play havoc with the performance benefits of RAMdrives unless you disable or possibly exclude them, or are transferring large media files that are excluded from scanning. 

That said I've been using https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-ramdisk/index.html for testing purposes. It supports all the features you've listed in your original post. I've found its automatic loading at boot and auto-saving when restarting to be particularly convenient and surprisingly fast, I don't have to think about it and can treat it like any other drive. It can generate a disk automatically, load a disk from an existing image, or load a disk from a settings file. For testing it's particularly convenient as you can even make a ROM drive out of it so it won't write to an already existing drive image, such as if you need to restart windows repeatedly in order to avoid windows caching skewing results. 

For all the features you wanted (timing saves and >32GB drives)  you'd be forced to go for the $70 Ultimate option at minimum. I'm not sure it's worth that, if it was my money I'd go for a 960 Pro. But for a RAMdrive it's pretty decent and it has been stable. They just updated it to fix Windows 8 / 10 updates breaking registration. They do offer a 30 day free trial so you can try it for yourself.

Here's a quick ATTO run 

 Image

Random question, this RAMdisk supports Direct-IO and SCSI logic modes for its drives. Wouldn't NVMe be faster than SCSI with its CPU overhead improvements for RAMdrive software now? Direct-IO gives best performance but not all software will see it (like HD Tune) regardless if it is mapped to a drive letter. HD Tune refused to see it unless I made it into a SCSI disk
 
CScottG
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Sat Dec 10, 2016 3:20 pm

Kougar wrote:
 They just updated it to fix Windows 8 / 10 updates breaking registration. They do offer a 30 day free trial so you can try it for yourself.

Do you know if they fixed Primocache as well?  I think with a UPS that would be the best overall solution (provided it doesn't get killed every time Windblows updates).
 
Kougar
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Mon Dec 12, 2016 12:49 am

According to this changelog they did so last year. I can tell you they actively manage/update their Primocache software from what I have seen, believe it or not but their Ramdisk software hadn't been updated since 2012 if you ignore the most recent update for it. That said I've never used Primocache so I can't speak about it.
 
rickkraft
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Tue Apr 11, 2017 8:55 am

Under Windows 10 Pro and using Crystal Disk Mark 3.0.4 to bench, My Samsung 960Evo Nvme drive gets Sequential read / write of 1685/1699 MB/s. My favorite QSoftRamDisk (now WinRamTech) is doing a read/write of 7813/7615. Thats 600% faster!!!
With SoftPerfect RamDisk, I'm getting a staggering read/write of 10586/9404. I'm testing this out more fully now.
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ThreeDigitIQ
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Thu Apr 27, 2017 8:33 am

I made a benchmark results video for 8 different virtual Ram Disk drive Software solutions.
Since I cannot post a link, google search for "v=18Z5k-M8Q68". Skip to 1:45 for the results
 
rayleech
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Thu Apr 27, 2017 11:41 am

ThreeDigitIQ, thanks for your efforts!
 
Vhalidictes
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Thu Apr 27, 2017 1:10 pm

ThreeDigitIQ wrote:
I made a benchmark results video for 8 different virtual Ram Disk drive Software solutions.
Since I cannot post a link, google search for "v=18Z5k-M8Q68". Skip to 1:45 for the results


Thanks! That's a fantastic video.
 
JustAnEngineer
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Re: RAMdisk/RAMdrive software recommendations?

Thu Apr 27, 2017 7:22 pm

ThreeDigitIQ wrote:
I made a benchmark results video for 8 different virtual Ram Disk drive Software solutions.
Since I cannot post a link, someone will post it for you. Skip to 1:45 for the results.
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