OR ImDisk, which is 'free' but politely asks for a donation....
It's hella fast.
Oh and the RamDrive supports TRIM.. So I can assume it's memory usage is not fixed, but only equals actual used space.
How to make a virtual sd card with this leak:
Enjoy!
You can use ImDisk to make said Ram Drive,
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk
I used to do this in wow back in the day with an 8GB ram drive. I moved all the main MPQ files onto the ram drive, and I used Mklink in Command Prompt to create hard links to the mpq's in the wow folder.
That way wow saw them as being in the wow folder, but were actually on the ram drive.
The result was my in city fps tripled, and my instance load times nearly disappeared (barely able to see the progress bar).
The paid versions are more simplified, but there is a tool called ImDisk that does pretty much the same job.
There are some imdisk tutorials but they all seem outdated so here's a quick rundown:
Be sure to have enough memory installed (24gb or more) otherwise your pc will kill you.
After installing it, go to your control panel, open it.
Create a new mount at Size of virtual disk fill set it to Gigabytes and the size (16).
At Device type set it to Harddisk volume.
At the right side click "Create virtual disk in virtual memory"
Then hit OK
http://i.imgur.com/P9cwOIp.jpg
Windows should prompt you now to format it, do that.
If that doesn't work, ImDisk has a format button.
Then the disk is available to install things on like a normal harddrive.
Once you're done installing planetside (again, the standalone is preferred vs steam) AND made sure your in-game settings are saved, Save the image and name it appropriately. Use the standard setting.
Every time you reboot the disk will be loaded out of memory as it's ran in windows so you have to load your image:
So when you want to play planetside, you start ImDisk, click the ...-button and click the file.
Set Create virtual disk in physical memory and hit OK, it'll take a bit longer to load than before as it's actually checking the files but once loaded, you're ready to go again.
A hassle? Maybe, but once set up it's almost as long as launching razer gamebooster.
ImDisk is free, open-source, and available for Windows.
I've also played around a little with the ram disk software that MSI provides with their motherboards, and it seemed to work pretty well.
ImDisk is GPL licensed and appears at least to have recent builds on their site, updated as recently as yesterday. That said, he says some of his tools were written years ago, but his screenshot shows it running on Windows 8, so must be somewhat updated. His source is available for download on his website with GPL license intact.
RAM makes part of your RAM act as a hard disk. Since RAM is faster than any hard disk, this improves performance for the files on the disk. However, loading screens are about the only time a game will fetch a significant amount of data from disk at a time. A RAM disk might quicken loading screens, but will almost certainly do nothing more.
What you'd want to do is use ImDisk to create a RAMDisk and put your Skyrim install into that.
The skyrim install is ~5.5 gB, which would put your RAM down to 2.5gB. Skyrim uses 2gB RAM. 512mB is not a lot of headroom for background processes. If you start having background processes being paged to disk you're in a worse state than you started in.
As it stands, I suggest you look at this, which might allow skyrim to put the ram you have to better use. (Though, I kind of doubt it offers much benefit)
Well, it's an either/or situation with CUDA, usually.
I don't think you're able to use your processor in tandem with the GPU and it may be that the GPU isn't as good as your processor for this task.
If you think your hard drive is a bottleneck, creating a RAM drive is easy — and you have plenty of ram to do it.
I see HP Z420 Workstation Xeon E5-2670 2.6ghz 8-Core / 32gb / 1tb / Q600 / Win10 64 on eBay for 420 USD. This has similar or better performance than an i7 7700K in multicore workloads (about 50-60% single thread performance but double the cores / threads).
There is even a HP Z820 Workstation 2x Intel Xeon E5-2670, 2.6Hz, 128GB Memory for $600 without storage or video cards but if your workload is multicore say you are video transcoding then this is a beast, standing its ground against the i9-7920X or the AMD Threadripper 1950X. Most workloads you could run from a ramdrive since you have 128GB of it so you only need a small SSD to boot the thing from.
you do need a specific program, im not sure what people tend to use (personally i only mod wii builds and leave netplay for netplay)
google brought up this as a possibilty, linked from the dolphin site: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Virtual_SD_Card_Guide
download https://www.mcmyadmin.com/ its a free web interface that will help you with this, also i recommend running your minecraft server on a ramdisk like imdisk http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk and have the backup for the world run to the c:\ via the built in backup in mcmyadmin.
Also make a copy of the whole ramdisk and save it to your desktop on the server incase you ever need to set the ramdisk backup you can just copy the contents to the ramdisk when you rerun it as if you restart or the server crashes the data in the ramdisk will be gone. You can do all this in ubuntu as well but the ramdisk part is harder. I just do it with server 2012 as i own a licence from school.
Disk io is slow on the dev servers so minecraft suffers, but i run mine in a ramdisk and 30 min backups and it runs flawlessly.
Download ImDisk and run SWTOR Unleashed, then choose the files that you want to load into the RAM-Disk and then click on the button.
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk
Unleashed does currently not proberly work under Windows10 because the tool commandline had changed and SWTOR Unleased can not create a formated RAM-Disc. So you have to create the RAM Disc yourself in ImDisc with the right size and then use Unleased.
This should be easy to fix, but the creator of SWTOR Unleashed disappeared.
There is also an older .bat file version from SWTOR Unleashed, that still works fine, but it does not have the fancy UI.
Cmdline version:
Download and install imdisk - http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk
Open command prompt (as administrator) and run: imdisk -a -s 2G -m X: -p "/fs:ntfs /q /y"
The above command creates a 2gb ramdisk, sets it to X: and formats it NTFS. Adjust as necessary.
Set the Transcoder temporary directory in plex: https://support.plex.tv/hc/en-us/articles/200250347-Transcoder
Good run down at link below, as well as how to create it on Windows startup.
RamDisks are easy with tools like ImDisk, but they are usually not really necessary for most use cases.
You OS already puts the code it is executing into you memory so placing programs you want to execute on a RamDisk will not really make them run faster, it will make them start faster since copying stuff from a RamDisk to RAM is fast, but you need to copy the program to RamDisk first on startup, which negates most of that benefit. Also you will have less RAM if you use part of it for a RamDisk and thus may need to page more often actually slowing things down under the wrong circumstances.
RamDisks are useful if you want to read and write data very fast, but well written programs that do that should take advantage of caching these things in RAM anyway. Sometimes a program can create something that sort of works like a RamDisk itself than you get stuff like 'in-memory database'.
Generally speaking unless you just want to play around for fun or really know better than the people who wrote the applications (because they are old or something) letting the OS and the programs deal with the RAM and where to put what makes more sense.
I might be an oddball here, but I like imdisk. It's tiny, mounts ISOs (right click, "Mount as ImDisk Virtual Disk". To get rid of, right click virtual disk and tell ImDisk to unmount.
It's free (open source), comes with no adware, and it's tiny (installer is only 351k currently). In addition to ISOs, I have used it to create/edit floppy disk images and it can do some ludicrously powerful stuff like creating virtual RAM drives. 99% of the time I use it for ISOs though.
Why not use ImDisk? It's free and open source, works great
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk
ninja edit: Dataram RAMDisk it's another alternative, although the free version is limited to 4GB it's incredibly easy to use.
edit: If you're on Linux, you already know what to do :)
You could try virtualbox. Install linux, making a raid out of a bunch of vhd files (you can define them as big as you want, as they only grow as space is actually used). So you can make them several terabytes each, even if you don't have that much space yet, so long as you plan to buy a bigger disk in the future. I'd go with LVM for building the raid instead of mdadm because you can add/remove volumes faster and easier. The vhds don't even have to be on your computer. You could spread them across your network, for near unlimited storage. Then you can use imdisk and devio to make the raid available to windows and mount it as though it were a local native hard disk.
I saw you mentioned an ISO mounter, and I used to use several, evolving from different choices after Daemon Tools turned into a pile of shit.
The best disk image mounter I've ever used (and still use daily!) is ImDisk.
Pretty much all of the tools on that page, actually, are staples for me when I need what they do. Great, great set of software.
Edit: link formatting.
Just add the nvme as a PCI Host Device in virt-manager
I do not try & reserve the device with vfio-pci
in /etc/modprobe.d/vfio.conf
I've had no issues passing through Sabrent Rocket nvme's (pcie3 version).
My vm is stable for days at a time.
With an nvme passed through I noticed no real benefit to using a Caching Manager (primocache). I think internally Windows uses your nvme & surplus RAM as a cache (I give my vm 20gb RAM)
I also use a RAM disk for my download / tmp folders.
Oops, got my SD card software mixed up.
ImDisk is likely your best bet. Be careful though, its easy to accidentally bluescreen yourself with configurable drivers like this.
If there's nothing you care about in the cache folders you could likely set jellyfin's cache dir to a ramdisk created with this as well to make the UI snappier.
~~Only through a hacked filter driver or a BIOS configuration will solve this. Check the BIOS settings if your USB drive/partition can be emulated as a CD/DVD drive.~~
Edit: Forgot to mention mountable ISO's (as suggested by /u/joe_bogan). Tools such as ImDisk may help.
You don't. Nowhere in the instructions does it mention mounting a real partition in a VM.
The only parts you'll have to do differently are:
finding a way to get the .iso file out of the VM to your actual PC. I would suggest a folder share or an app like Resilio.
cloning your virtual disk to a physical disk. This one is a bit trickier. I would personally try using ImDisk to mount the .vdi and TransMac to turn the .vdi into an image and then transmac again to restore that image to a physical volume
Get a program like Imdisk ( http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk ). You mount the file called SD.raw in the anther's dolphin folders.
Make sure when mounting it to. Check the box that says "removable storage" or something along those line. When unmounting it don't hit "unmount from virtual imdisk", instead just click eject. For some reason unmounting it normally will either make no changes saved or flat out delete everything in the .raw.
Hope this helps. If you need any more help I'll do my best once I'm home.
don't use an SD card maker. use a program like imdisk to not only mount the .raw, but to change its filesize. you then reformat the .raw to accommodate for its new filesize, and then add the things you want.
this is imdisk: http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk
linked from: https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Virtual_SD_Card_Guide
Use this.
Download Psycho Ghost's build.
Using ImDisk, open the sd.raw file.
Copy the "codes" folder and the "pf" folder to the sd.raw file.
Hope I gave the right instructions.
I use imdisk. It's free/opensource (via a non-restrictive custom license) and fast.
Unlike tmpfs, it's rather more.. manual in it's initialization, but it recently (sometime in the past 6 months) grew the ability to allocate RAM as needed rather than grabbing the full allocation at once.
Combined with a couple of scripts to automate symlinking and file copying (that I should really improve and publish), it can be used quite easily, and for more games than just PoE.
Yes, Sandboxie is great. On Windows, I always use it when surfing unknown sites or trying untrusted programs. It works perfectly with Ramdisks like Imdisk (kind of like tmpfs on Linux), on which you can store every modification the sandboxed application has created. Thus you can be sure that by unmounting the Ramdisk or just rebooting, you undo any changes a program would have done to your system.
Although Sandboxie is proprietary, I trust it relatively well, since you can always easily verify if it is working.
I don't know about enterprise-approved, but Imdisk is awesome. It adds a menu to the control panel and lets you mount / unmount ISOs.
There's also ImdiskToolkit, which has a nicer (set of) GUI(s) and even come with support for several virtual hard drive formats.
Neither of the above have any advertising built in at all.
I'm not too sure what you are using it for exactly, but I would recommend using ImDisk over that if you are looking to manage image files other than an ISO. (since Windows 8 and 10 can mount ISOs anyway)
First download imdisk don't worry it's ad free and very light weight.
Then mount the iso virtually by right clicking and mounting. No usb drive needed. Windows 10 might keep some leftover stuff in a windows.old folder on the root of your hard drive. You can choose to delete that or copy over any needed files.
You want to check out ImDisk. Open source, in active development, works on practically every flavour of Windows.
I agree some of the other options out there are sketchy, or at least look like poorly made freeware/shareware things that get pushed on download sites. AMD also makes a RAMdisk utility, if that's trustable enough for you.
There's very little reason to pay $30 for a simple utility with questionable results.
>I might be an oddball here, but I like imdisk.
You're not at all alone on that one. I suggested it as well but I'm dismayed I didn't respond to this thread sooner. It's one of those packages that should be on every computer in every IT department on Earth.
Olof, ImDisk's developer, is very genial personality as far as I've seen and interacted with him online. If you're as much a fan as I am, send him a tweet via @LTRData on Twitter, he appreciates the good word :)
Just heads up - everyone in this thread is mentioning ramdisk, but it too is commercial software and their "free" option is quite limited. There's an unencumbered, fully open source option called imdisk:
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/#ImDisk
Lets not run from commercial software into the arms of another commercial software vendor just because the latter has a very limited "free" version.
Also, I use imdisk for my ramdisks. It allows you to package the data you use in ramdisk as a virtual disk image. That way you can unmount the disk when you're shutting down and set it up to reload the disk at boot, enabling persistence without having to move the files back and forth manually. I use this regularly with steam games and junction magic. It requires a little bit of setup ahead of time, but if you've got things like dolphin that are extremely HDD dependent it's helpful.
It's out of beta now, and costs money for the full version, but PrimoCache is another useful application. It caches the most used files on your harddrive to ram and caches writes to the harddrive into RAM before slowly dumping it to the harddrive over a period of time. This effectively removes any HDD bottleneck -- The only downside is that it has to cache the files first before you'll see any benefit. Primocache now keeps cache data of a restart, so your system boot is slightly slower while it's loading the cache into memory, but your computer's operation will be much faster.
If you don't mind me asking, what prompted you to add IMDisk to your list of "bullshit malware/BHO" carriers?
AFAIK, IMDisk has never had malware attached to it -- When it's detected as such, it's usually a false positive (iirc, because of it's past use of AutoIT resources). I've been using it for several years and I trust it implicitly... It began as a reboot.pro project many years ago and the reboot.pro community is steeped in some really solid, reliable (albeit at times, obscure) programming -- that same community has paved the way for a metric shit-ton of excellent, minimalist software engineering and development solutions.
Unless you can/will provide proof, I'm sincerely doubtful of your claim that IMDisk is "riddled" with malware...
I have enjoyed IMDisc it allows you to do some things like make RAM drives for whatever reason you may want. This is in addition to mounting ISOs. This is of course open source.
Ah, this is an interesting idea.
The problem though is that ramdisks are volitile right? So you would have to move all the bf3 data to ram every time you boot your computer. Or is that automated?