Posted by
kodabar on
Jul 20, 2013; 10:42am
URL: http://kodabar-dayz-daizy-single-player-forum.163.s1.nabble.com/Daizy-on-ramdisk-tp10858p10865.html
I've seen these videos too. I've run DayZ and DaiZy from SSD drives and from ramdisks and noticed barely any performance improvement. This is pretty much true of all games. Games don't tend to hit the disk very much when playing, so there just aren't any improvements to be had beyond the loading screen.
There are some games that do benefit from ramdisks. Rage is one such because it tends to load higher resolution textures from disk only when you look at an object.
Anyway, if you want to set up DayZ and DaiZy to use a ramdisk, here's what you need to know.
The first thing is to make sure you have enough memory to actually contain the ramdisk. My Operation Arrowhead folder is approximately 20GB in size, so I'll need at least that amount of free memory, plus the couple of gig the games needs to run plus a couple of gig for Windows. So I'll need at least 24GB or RAM before I start.
The second thing you need is ramdisk software. There used to be a ramdisk command built into DOS/Windows, but not any more. So you'll need some software. There's a lot of it about and it's hard to know which one to use.
Here's a list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_RAM_drive_softwareImDisk is free and works pretty well. I'm going to use that.
http://www.ltr-data.se/opencode.html/With ImDisk downloaded and installed, it's time to make the disk. You can either do this from the command prompt or from the Control Panel app that it installs. If you're not used to the command line, then use the app.
From the app, I choose File > Mount new virtual disk
In the box that appears, I leave the "Image file" blank (because this is going to be a ramdisk) and select 20GB as the "Size of virtual disk" and set the drive letter to be K (choose anything you like as long as it doesn't conflict with an existing drive). I click the "Create virtual disk in physical memory" radio button.
Windows may pop up a box asking if I want to format the new drive. Cancel that. Format the disk from within ImDisk. Once that's done, the disk is ready to use.
What you're going to need to do now is copy the files in there, rename the old folder and create a link to the ramdisk.
My Operation Arrowhead is located in (yours won't be):
E:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead
So I copy the whole of the OA folder to drive K. And I have a cup of tea, a cigarette and shout at the Tour de France on the telly because they keep pronouncing Rui Costa's namely incorrectly.
Once the files are copied over, rename the old folder (E:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead) to something obvious (E:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead backup). If something goes wrong, I need to be able to get the files back.
Okay, so our files are copied over and the disk copy is safely renamed. You could at this point, just alter the target line (a lot of YouTube videos suggest this) but that has a bit of a problem. There are registry entries that point to the location of your files, so the game is still actually going to want to read the hard disk version instead of the ramdisk. I've seen YouTube guys fail to understand this point and rave about how amazing their ramdisk is, without realising that it's all still loading from a physical hard disk still. Ah, YouTube...
So what I'm going to do is make a symbolic link. This is just like a shortcut. It tricks Windows into thinking something is in one place when it's really in another. To do this, I need to use the mklink command from the command line.
You need to open an elevated command line - right click on the Command Prompt icon and select "run as administrator"
At the command line you're going to type a command in this format
mklink /d fakeplace realplace
So in this case I'm going to type:
mklink /d "E:\Steam\steamapps\common\arma 2 operation arrowhead" "K:\arma 2 operation arrowhead"
Okay? The /d tells Windows that it's a directory and the e:\whatever is the place that the OA files were in before I started. I renamed that folder to something else. This is creating a fake folder which is actually just linked to the k:\whatever. I need to put quotation marks around the file paths as they contain spaces which gets Windows very confused otherwise.
And that's it. I'm done. I can run the game using my existing shortcut, but it'll be loading everything from RAM instead of from the disk.
This may seem like quite a complicated process, but it's actually quite easy. It's a lot harder to describe than it is to do.