question+^_^+

[Chik'Tikka]

has anyone tried installing PSO2 to a Sofware RAM Drive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM_drive)? and if anyone did, what kinda load speeds do you see??+^_^+

[Neirene]

Altough you may enjoy of incredibly fast speeds with a RAM drive you might lose all the information that is stored in case of a power outage.

That´s why the RAM is used as a temporary way to store things on it.
A more reliable solution could be use flash memory (SSD) since it´s a memory made to actually store long term data on it despite lower transfer speeds but for a game like PSO2 is more than enough (with either SATAII or SATAIII) and there wont be a data loss.


http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/RAM-Drives-the-New-Trend-in-Storage-2.jpg

As you can see a ram drive needs also an extra power suply to keep the data alive when the PC is off and there is also the risk that it might fail and lose all the data which is inside of it instantly only way to avoid that (and not entirely) is to also invest in an UPS which are very expensive too!

Moreover the loading speeds depends also on what kind of optimizations were made to the software (in this case PSO2) to take advantage of diferent kinds of storages, thats why many times there are certain applications that perform relatively the same loading speed in a SSD vs a HDD PSO2 is a perfect example of this as i´ve tried it before as well.

[Chik'Tikka]

From what i read, Sofware RAM Drives can use existing on-board RAM, and many RAM Drive programs save files and programs on a regular HDD (though they don't save them on the fly, but you wouldn't need to do that with PSO2, just back it up after each update) and loads it when the machine boots, I'm just asking, because I'm planing on eventually getting 32 GB RAM in a machine I'm building (though that's at least a year from now), and my current set up has nearly 45 seconds load time in PSO2 just to go from lobby to campship+^_^+ well, it was just a question i posted because i was bored and curious to see if anyone tried+^_^+

[Ana-Chan]

To be honest, the game doesn't actually read much from disk during the transition. I have about 5 second transitions between areas (10 at most) and I have a regular SATA hard disk. In fact, thinking about it, I'm sure that it is on my SATA 150 drive, not one of the SATA 300s, so it is actually slower.
So I would honestly say that unless you are using really old hard disks, along the lines of slow ATA 33 or ATA 66, then the reason you are getting such slow loading times is for a different reason.

[Neirene]

Same over here I tried the game on the SSD which runs on SATA3 and then moved all the files to the slave disk which is a very old HDD that can barely handle SATA2 and the diference in loading times is minimal, in fact i decided to leave PSO2 and my other games on the slave disk and keep the SSD with SATA3 only for operating system purposes.

As for the RAM disk issue it's a very strange technology that nowadays is not reliable at all for long term storage is like you try to play PSO2 from a DAT Tape Drive doesnt make sense at all actually SSD is the best solution price/reliability at this moment as many datacenters are already starting to migrate from the SCSI arquitecture to the SSD one for their servers too.

In my opinion Chiktikka you wont need more than 16 GB (actually 8GB) of ram in a home computer more than that is already a horrible waste of money in my opinion (unless you are planning on virtualizing many machines with 1 computer) you can also invest in a nice CPU and Graphic Card and then in several SSD's if you prefer that would be a much better solution for a long lasting PC for the games and applications of today and tomorrow.

It would be a good idea you check your computer and connections carefully because having to wait 45 seconds between transitions of lobbies and campships doesnt sounds right at all.

[Chik'Tikka]

my build (when i have the $$) will have http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231468 in it (brand may change based on prices but it's still going to be 8GB 2133 MHz RAM), and that's probably where it'll stay for a good long time, also, since i can only has $$$ for one HDD this fall, ima get 500GB drive (whichever's cheapest), I'll likely install OS on 120GB partition within that drive so if i ever get a SSD i can Norton ghost my OS+^_^+ i was more curious then anything if anyone tried this+^_^+ also fixed my loading time, I'm down to about 20 seconds now, it was just VMWare running crap in the background that didn't show up in MSconfig and it wasn't agreeing with GG much til just today+^_^+ (you know that pesky college software they make you get+^_^+) oh, GG had another Patch today that made PSO2 work with Firefox again+^_^+

[Ana-Chan]

oh, GG had another Patch today that made PSO2 work with Firefox again+^_^+

Yup, they undid the changes again.