3 Commando Brigade

Dimmdrive Ramdisk

Just seen this lurking at the bottom of the steam store so i thought id post it on here. Its a program where it makes a virtual drive using your Ram memory and then moves the game directory of any game you have on steam that you want to play on to this drive which gives you fast loading speeds or something along those lines.

Just watch the dam video!!! 
http://store.steampowered.com/app/337070/

Does this look promising as a must have or not? Its £22 which is kinda steep. Also dont know if it would work for Arma because of mods and huge file sizes? I dont really understand so what do you think?

Skinny

Virtual disks have been around for decades, this is just the latest evolution.  They always quote high read rates because they're reading from main memory, but you still have to load the data into main memory from SSD/HD at some point, so its not free,

If you have a huge amount of unused RAM then they can help speed a game, but if you have a half decent SSD I doubt you'll notice much difference.

If you're thinking about Arma, then the bottleneck is the poor multithreaded support, not SSD access time.

Iv got an ssd but haven't set it up cause I can't be bothered to change all the game over.. Iv bought a new os aswell and it's just sat there

... send funds to BankOfSerjames@LoadsOfMoney.com

In seriousness if you can fit the entire game and all it's mod files into the "spare" RAM that is used in a RAM disk then it will work well - ONCE it's fully loaded into the RAM.

However our current public build would need 14GB of Game Files + Approx 10GB of Mod files.

Unless you're Rocking a MINIMUM of 32GB of ram bearing in mind you need at least 8GB free "ram" as memory this will not benefit you.

Ideally 64GB and over need apply only...

(and NO I do not have 64Gb...)

SJ

In the video there is some feature where you can click a button when the game file size was larger than your Ram size and it would do its magic and make it work. I just thought that having a huge file size probably wouldn't work or not show much benefit. Im gonna stay away from it.

Gav's right unless you're running Masses of Ram - More than 32GB for Arma, it's not worth it.

SJ

Skinny

There is a quick and dirty solution.  Install the SSD and move the arma folder from its current location on the HD to the SDD.  Then add a special link (called a junction point) so that the Windows and Steam think Arma is in its original location.

Details on the junction point can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point.

Its just a single command from a cmd prompt (with admin privileges).

mklink /J"C:\Program Files (x86)\game" "D:\Program Files (x86)\game"

Where "C:\Program Files (x86)\game" is the original arma folder and "D:\Program Files (x86)\game" is the new folder on the SSD.

This means plugging it in Skinny, not just resting it inside your computer case.
Sorry, couldn't resist.  ;-)

Haha.. Oh Apollo your wrong, Iv now taken it out of the computer case. It's resting in my desk drawer with heaps of other crap on top of it. I think I'm gonna let it sit there a little while longer and then go with the full shabang and start fresh with windows 8 or I might not..