What is Reddit's opinion of
ImDisk Toolkit?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
32 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I've used ImDisk extensively after I got tired of all the fluff in daemon and alcohol, Then windows 10 happened but it's still handy for older systems and can be run purely with context menus no UI window etc. Can do ramdisks also so it can still be handy on Win10...
First, you gotta have excess RAM. I have 64 GB. Second, get some software to make the RAM drive. I used this, made a 17 GB RAM drive. Next, make a directory on the RAM drive called "MSFScache" or something like that, then launch MSFS, go to the data settings in MSFS, and set the rolling cache to the directory you just created. I used a 16GB size for my rolling cache.
I really recommend Imdisk Toolkit. It's free, open source, regularly updated, and supports mounting hard drive and floppy disk images, in addition to CD and DVD images. It also supports creating a RAM disk, if you'd find that useful. It can both provide a virtual view of an image stored on disk and read/write data as necessary, or it can copy the entire image to main memory and provide a virtual view of that (which, in some situations, would be significantly more performant than streaming from the hard drive).
You can use software like ImDisk to create a virtual disk from your RAM space.
Then you can assign it a letter and then place it into your plex server's "transcode location" settings.
You should also test your ramdisk to ensure the speeds are as expected.
This will spare the longevity of your SSD / HDD from having to constantly write and attempt to keep up with demands.
It's essentially the same - but the SD card on PC is a virtual SD card file called SD.raw. Other than that the file placement etc will be the same as if you were doing it on a hardware SD card.
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ill just paste some stuff from soj:
>How to bring your custom build into Dolphin (Windows): First download ImDisk https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/ Navigate to your dolphin folder and find the sd.raw file you want to modify inside Dolphin/User/Wii/ Copy and paste to make a backup of that file Now after installing IMDisk, open it up and click on Mount new. Find the sd.raw you want to modify and make sure the settings match this:(edited)
SourceForge
<strong>ImDisk Toolkit</strong>
Download ImDisk Toolkit for free. Ramdisk for Windows and mounting of image files. This tool will let you mount image files of hard drive, cd-rom or floppy, and create one or several ramdisks with various parameters. This all-in-one package includes the ImDisk Virtual Disk Dr...
double click on the drive and treat it like a normal SD card
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when you're done, right click on the drive and click Eject
You can create a persistent RAM disk with ImDisk Toolkit.
Tutorial:
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/174094-how-create-ram-disk-imdisk-windows-10-a.html
Of course you'll need to have a lot of RAM available, especially when you plan to install programs on XP...
And startup/shutdown times of your host system will increase.
>Would moving my games/CEMU to an SSD help?
Yes but not significantly i'm afraid. You can try this if you have enough RAM :
- Create a ram disk (allocate RAM ressources to create a file system partition) and move CEMU install on for playing.
- Then move it back before power off (a ram disk content is deleted on each reboot)
I recommend ImDisk to create your ram disk.
When having a full pipeline cache, there's no need to do this anymore.
To quote the pinned message on the discord from u/soj
First download ImDisk https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/
Navigate to your dolphin folder and find the sd.raw file you want to modify inside Dolphin/User/Wii/
Copy and paste to make a backup of that file
Now after installing IMDisk, open it up and click on Mount new. Find the sd.raw you want to modify.
When you're done, click eject.
If you are on windows ImDisk Toolkit is a great one to use. It allows for dynamic allocation of ram, lets you save it to a file on shutdown (for directory structure and persistence reasons), and its FREE.
Settings -> Transcoder -> Transcoder temporary directory
This is where Plex generates the file it's transcoding to for the client to then stream. I use the ImDisk Toolkit to create a 4GB RAM drive as 'R:' then point the above setting to use R: as it's cache location.
My GPU can handle 5 transcode streams (Quadro P400) and 4GB seems just enough to handle this.
If you start a stream which is transcoding, you'll see all the files being generated. It's quite a lot of wear on an SSD, and would be slow on a spinny disk, so a Ram drive, if you can afford the spare Ram, works great.
Try putting Rolling Cache in RAMDisk. I also have 32GB RAM and I use 6 GB for Rolling Cache so 28GB remains available for MSFS. Scenery loads much faster.
RAMDisk configured with lmdisk:
No need. You can mount vmdk with Vmware Workstation to act as physical drive to host (no virtualisation required).
Or use https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/ for .vmdk, .vdi mount to physical host (again - no virtualisation required)
Have you used a virtual optical disk drive before?
>This tool will let you mount image files of hard drive, cd-rom or floppy, and create one or several ramdisks with various parameters.
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>This all-in-one package includes the ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver (2.0.10), the DiscUtils library that extends the number of supported image file formats, and adds several GUIs and features.
I used this tool for a 4GB RAMdrive ... when my earlier PC had 32 GB RAM. I only have 16 GB now, but will consider using it again and just set a 1GB RAM drive.
Yeah, mine looks like this, and never changes:
Using a ramdrive also means a little less wear and tear on my ssd. I use imdisk which is a great free option.
>You can use
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>ImDisk
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>for this, it's free and open source. There's no reason to use commercial software for this.
as u/MaXiMiUS pointed out, you can use https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/ for that too. its free and has "unlimited" Ramdisk space
ImDisk free RAM Disk NTFS TRIM AWE, Intel XTU set Turbo Boost Power Time Window Max. Good to go man. Also people have actually water cooled with vodka.
You might try Nagendra's post about RAMDISKs. It uses ImDisc Portable. I've used it and it works very well.
- Not if you partition your RAM drive wisely and leave enough for other processes.
- ImDisk Toolkit
- That should be more than enough for a maximum of 2 transcode sessions.
Byte my Bits did a quick tutorial on how to set this up, plus his channel is worth a subscribe for any Plex enthusiast.
Currently doing this on windows 10 pro. I run an 8th gen intel NUC for a plex server NUC8i7BEH. I already have a 512GB Samsung 970 pro M.2 drive so I wasn't expecting much in the way of performance gains and didn't really see any. I primarily did it to reduce writes. Video files are on a separate freenas server. The NUC only hosts the metadata and does the transcoding.
I have 64GB in the machine. Plex is 32bit so you really don't have to worry about it using anything over 4GB.
I run a 16GB imdisk (https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/) ramdrive exclusively for plex transcoding. I don't think I've ever seen it use over 1-2GB at a time but I also only use my plex server for myself. I don't have a good answer as to how much it uses per transcode stream but I believe that answer exists. Pretty sure I've seen people who do know mention those stats in other threads before. Probably going to bump it down to 8GB and see how that goes. In my situation, it's probably more than enough. I would rate the performance gain as negligible but I'm also not really stressing the system much in a way that would likely see a performance benefit. YMMV
I also run a 16GB primocache (https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/) L1 disk cache to try and speed up metadata reads. Again, in my situation, probably overkill and netted minimal performance gain. If I didn't already have an NVME drive serving the metadata, the performance gain would likely be greater. But any noticeable performance gain could also be highly dependent on the number and type of client. I primarily use our PS4 for plex watching and that client is pretty darn slow no matter what. iOS clients on my phone and tablet seem to benefit somewhat though when scrolling through libraries.
Good luck.
I never got that at all the only time I was ever asked to install an IOS was through the Minima Launcher. There is ways to install them but I'm not sure how since usually I find it just asks. Maybe try Minima Launcher again but if not then I'm somewhat clueless when it comes to getting those as it just worked for me when I tried.
If you need to access the SD.raw to add anything the program that can access them is this. Though I'm still uncertain exactly how the IOS files work.
Try the files I use. Place the Project M Remix.elf in your ISO's folder, same as Smash Bros and place the Project M Remix sd.raw in Dolphin-emu/wii.
You're free to use my dolphin.ini too, just keep in mind if you do your own settings would be overwritten so you'd have to change them back in the settings. You'd also need to change the paths to the raw file again. The dolphin.ini is located in Dolphin-emu/Config. Once you've set default ISO to the RSBE01 ISO and configured the paths for the SD loading the elf file should work. I'd be confused if this doesn't solve your problem. Again, ensure you're using the official play store Dolphin and not mmj. I'd probably backup or change the name of your own dolphin.ini as well just incase it doesn't work and you want to quickly revert back. Surely though.
If that doesn't work it certainly could be the ISO's but as long as it's RSBE01 and a clean one it should work no problem. Otherwise you could try using BrawlBuilder to apply the GCT file which is basically the cheats file directly to the ISO. Just note in doing so the patched ISO has no guarantee to work with the other mods other than Project M Remix. At least for me specifically with only Project+ I had to patch the ISO. I didn't have to patch anything for the others to work though. I'm not sure what download folder usually contains the GCT usually it's the wii version of the files. Otherwise you could use imdisk to take the file out the SD.raw itself on a Windows PC.
Is it a particular model #? Pictures? There seem to be a number of variations.
In general maxing out the ram is never a bad idea if it's affordable. Also readyboost is apparently still available as an option in Windows 7. So maybe grab one of those tiny usb sticks (the little nub ones) that's adequately performant -- could give you a slight boost in some areas.
https://www.lifewire.com/speed-up-windows-7-with-readyboost-3506875
Depending on how constrained you are setting up a generic ramdisk and using it for certain things like the browser's disk cache could help.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/
If it has a spinning hard drive, consider replacing with an SSD.
The idea here is to make sure the cpu is the primary bottleneck. You provably can't get around that but you can avoid making disk access one too.
P.S.
Your machine probably "runs like a snail" because it's got an Intel Atom processor which while decent is tuned for low power consumption and probably runs at sub-2 GHz speeds. If you're lucky it might be dual-core or have hyperthreading. And in all likelihood it's 32-bit
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-atom-cpu,1947.htmlw
Bad guide, it would seem!
For Windows, ok, that's easy. I use ImDisk and have it set to make an Ramdisk as drive letter R of 4GB in size (my server can handle about 8 streams), and start automatically with Windows.
Then in Plex, set the Transcoding directory to R:\
Boom, you're done. Start off a transcoding stream, and you should see the folders appear in R:\
Sure, download https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/
Run RamDisk Configuration and enter the amount of memory you wanna use for the ramdisk.
Assign a drive letter and voila :)
ImDisk does that, is very lightweight and allows also the creation of RAM-disks (that's what I use it for mostly as W10 can mount an ISO natively, as has been said).
I use a small, free program called imdisk:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/
Just install it. It'll create 3 shortcuts on your desktop. Open RamDisk Config. Set the size to 80-100mb. Take note of the drive letter. Tick 'launch at windows startup'
Next you'll need to make a new document on your desktop. You can call it 'link shaders.bat' (.bat for batch file). In the file you want these 4 lines: mkdir r:\CachedHLSLShaders mkdir r:\ShaderCacheD3D11 mkdir r:\ShaderCacheD3D11_GI mkdir r:\minimap
where 'r:' is your ramdisk drive that you confiured earlier.
Next you need to find where those directories are on your computer. And put the directories into the file as well:
mklink /D "C:\games\steam\steamapps\common\Path of Exile\CachedHLSLShaders" r:\CachedHLSLShaders mklink /D "C:\games\steam\steamapps\common\Path of Exile\ShaderCacheD3D11" r:\ShaderCacheD3D11 mklink /D "C:\games\steam\steamapps\common\Path of Exile\ShaderCacheD3D11_GI" r:\ShaderCacheD3D11_GI mklink /D "C:\Users\kay\Documents\My Games\Path of Exile\Minimap" r:\minimap
File based erasure can be done, but is not fail safe. There are many free software that do this.
If you're viewing on a computer where you have admin privileges, you can extract the unencrypted file into a RAM drive, then nothing would be left on disk. I use ImDisk Toolkit to create RAM drives.
Shadowplay always used to be a performance hit for me as well, somewhere between 20 and 30 FPS. It did help a bit by lowering the recording quality to 30FPS and halving the bit rate.
But what fixed it for me was to put the shadowplay temp files on a 4gb ramdisk. You can set the path for the temp files by hitting Alt-Z, then selecting Settings -> Recordings -> Temporary files.
As for the ramdisk, I use the open source program ImDisk. Be sure you have plenty of ram before you go with this approach, however.
I was rather surprised how well using the ramdisk improved performance, since I do have an SSD anyway so I didn't think it would still be a bottleneck. Recording at max quality no longer seems to have any performance impact.
In order to mount the virtual SD card mentioned elsewhere in this post, I'd recommend ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver, as it allows you to mount a file as a drive via right-clicking and specifying how it will be configured. Do note though that while mounted, Dolphin can't read the file, so you have to unmount it after finishing your edits.
Any modifications will still almost certainly desync netplay, no matter how mundane, but this is the easiest way to do custom builds in Dolphin as it's usually treated just like a 2GB SD card. Do note that the version of Dolphin supported by netplay does not have SDHC support, and thus is limited to a max of 2GB for an sd.raw file in size despite homebrew being possible in Dolphin. (Which is also why large custom builds like Legacy XP require compiling an ISO with files injected into it using tools they provide)
Buy more RAM, and not SSD's. RAM is significantly faster in the order of 10,000x faster than SSD's. Once the game's files are loaded into RAM, they'll never be loaded from disk again, until you reboot your computer, or run out of cache. If you haven't already, Google how to change your Windows registry to tell Windows to be far more aggressive in it's disk caching. With 24GB of RAM, my cache is almost always larger than 18GB. Games load instantly, everything loads instantly, it's just instant loading all over the place. Even if you close out of the game, and wait an arbitrary amount of time, like 12 hours, next time you load the game it'll just instantly load in 0.1ms, because it's actually never been unloaded from RAM.
For more advanced users, you can also use:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/imdisk-toolkit/
This above tool to create RAM drives and then use symbolic links in Windows to copy all or some of any games' files to it, and the game will be oblivious to thinking it is loading files from it.
> VMs exist for this reason, regardless of your hubris.....
You think you can't escape from VM? That's wrong, Especially because there is already anti-vm malware which stay inactive as long a VM (or it's process is running). Again no one starts VM just to view PDF files, that makes no sense. Use Sandboxie makes more sense here and doesn't waste much resources, even a ram drive would make more sense cause everything gets deleted too after it's closed. IMGDisk is open source and it takes seconds to create one.