4 ms·
I invested in 64GB of RAM. I have a little script to create a 32GB ramdisk on startup. Whenever I want to play a game, I copy its folder to the ramdisk, renam
by sillysaurus2 13y ago
I invested in 64GB of RAM. I have a little script to create a 32GB ramdisk on startup. Whenever I want to play a game, I copy its folder to the ramdisk, rename the original, then symlink it from the original location to the ramdisk.
SSDs are great, but ramdisk gaming loads in like five seconds flat. I suppose games will outgrow ~48GB in several years, but my hardware will grow old by then anyway.
- shurcooL 13y agoThat... is pretty sick. Well done.
- lsiebert 13y agoHmm... I should try that. My laptop has 16 gb, but I don't play that many games? How big are most game installs anyway?
- bane 13y agoThat seems like an awful lot of work to play a game. Off an SSD games usually start in about that time anyway.
- wtallis 13y agoThe best solution and what will probably be adopted by high-end SteamBoxes eventually, is to ship a large cheap hard drive and a SSD large enough to cache 2-3 games.
- ewzimm 13y agoSo why would you prefer a SSD to RAM?
- icebraining 13y agoBecause the cache doesn't disappear when you turn the machine off, forcing you to read the games from spinning rust every time.
- wtallis 13y ago64GB of RAM isn't possible on consumer hardware, and costs almost as much as a 1TB SSD. A high-quality cache drive on the order of 120-256GB is way cheaper and gets rid of most disk bottlenecks, and is automatically managed rather than requiring the user to write scripts to create a RAM disk for each game.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoI bought my 64GB of RAM + mobo off the shelf at Microcenter. So it's probably consumer hardware. Cache SSD drives are mostly bogus, because insanely they cache by alphabetical file order instead of most recently used file. E.g. The folder "Aardvark" will be cached, but "Zebra" probably won't be, even if you use the Zebra program more often. I know, it's insane, and I almost couldn't believe they implemented caching like that. Almost. This was some time ago, so maybe the state of things has improved since then.
- wtallis 13y agoYour 64GB system uses Intel's LGA2011 server platform. It's not consumer-class hardware even if they label some of the parts for "enthusiasts". 40 PCIe lanes makes no sense for any consumer purpose - it's an odd number even for multi-GPU use, and quad-channel memory isn't economical and probably won't be even after the transition to DDR4. I've never heard of a SSD caching system that operates on filenames. Apple's Fusion Drive system is the most filesystem-aware caching system I know of, and it ignores filenames and works based on frequency of access. Intel's Smart Response system is a block-level cache implemented as part of their software RAID system. Flashcache and bcache for Linux are block-level caches that can be layered over or under software RAID. Hybrid drives that put 4-8GB of NAND on a hard drive are completely filesystem-agnostic, as are the hardware RAID controllers that support SSD caching.
- hdevalence 13y agoWhy not just use bcache?
- cbhl 13y agoHow long does it take you to copy its folder to the ramdisk? Is this longer than it would take for e.g. the Linux kernel to figure out it should cache that folder in memory by itself?
- staunch 13y agoThe advantage is that it's definitely all in memory the first time you read it. For games this is very nice.
- w-ll 13y agoWhat's a good 16gb stick or do you use 8 8gb sticks?