03-26-2013, 08:24 PM
As an alternative to using a RAMDisk, I've been playing with FancyCache http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/ which is in beta at the moment with a 180-day key (they've been renewing the key each time it expires so far, so there's a good chance you'll get to use it for longer for free anyway).
There's a Disk and a Volume version and I use the Volume one to just cache the reads on my Games partition D:
I just start it manually before loading Arma (I don't think it has a "start with Windows" option anyway) and the idea is that any subsequent reads of the same data will be from the RAMdisk rather than the HDD, making it a lot faster. Obviously the downside compared to a RAMdisk is that the first load of any data won't be any faster but the benefit is that you don't have to try and work out which files should go on the RAMdisk, which is obviously tricky when using different mods/servers (for example, should I use the space left after putting the main OA/A2 files on there for ACE or CWR2). The other benefit is that you don't have to wait five minutes to load the RAMdisk whenever you want to use it, or when changing RAMdisk from e.g. A2 to DCS World.
I've got 16GB so I've been setting the L1 Cache size to 8196MB (I could go to 11GB as that's how big I made my RAMDisk) and Read-only as I don't need to cache writes. I don't use the L2 Cache as that's for using Invisible Memory (only really relevant on 32-bit OS) or SSD (which I don't have). I'm not sure if any of the other settings (Block Size, etc) would benefit from being changed from the defaults so I've left those alone.
I did find when using it the other night with SP ArmA that when the 8GB cache had filled up ArmA became very laggy, although that might have been a coincidence as certain missions cause it to run at 17fps or less on my machine anyway due to the AI and engine issues. Just be aware that it's beta software though and might have some issues.
There's a Disk and a Volume version and I use the Volume one to just cache the reads on my Games partition D:
I just start it manually before loading Arma (I don't think it has a "start with Windows" option anyway) and the idea is that any subsequent reads of the same data will be from the RAMdisk rather than the HDD, making it a lot faster. Obviously the downside compared to a RAMdisk is that the first load of any data won't be any faster but the benefit is that you don't have to try and work out which files should go on the RAMdisk, which is obviously tricky when using different mods/servers (for example, should I use the space left after putting the main OA/A2 files on there for ACE or CWR2). The other benefit is that you don't have to wait five minutes to load the RAMdisk whenever you want to use it, or when changing RAMdisk from e.g. A2 to DCS World.
I've got 16GB so I've been setting the L1 Cache size to 8196MB (I could go to 11GB as that's how big I made my RAMDisk) and Read-only as I don't need to cache writes. I don't use the L2 Cache as that's for using Invisible Memory (only really relevant on 32-bit OS) or SSD (which I don't have). I'm not sure if any of the other settings (Block Size, etc) would benefit from being changed from the defaults so I've left those alone.
I did find when using it the other night with SP ArmA that when the 8GB cache had filled up ArmA became very laggy, although that might have been a coincidence as certain missions cause it to run at 17fps or less on my machine anyway due to the AI and engine issues. Just be aware that it's beta software though and might have some issues.