Gadgetory

the concept of RAM disks or RAM drives is not exactly a new one and the idea behind it is pretty simple if you have more system memory than your applications require you can use software to allocate some of it to make a lightning-fast storage device that your system sees exactly the same way it would any other standard hard drive or solid-state drive meaning you could use it for anything sounds cool right well we do lots of cool stuff on this channel we've even got a razor siren review coming soon so stay tuned for that but for now roll the intro then we'll tell you more cooler masters casemod world series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes entries closed February 7th 2015 click now to learn more now the first time pretty much anyone hears about Ram drives their mind starts buzzing with ideas like oh snap I could put my operating system on it or like I'm gonna put all my games on it so I'll be the first one to the Hellion battlefield but life is never that simple is it system memory is usually at least an order of magnitude more expensive than even high-end storage drives so those multi gig application and game installs get really expensive real fast and even if you did want to buy as much RAM as you can fit in your motherboard unless you're buying a server grade board that won't be as much as you might hope and the list of disadvantages actually keeps on trucking here RAM is what is known as volatile storage which means every time the system powers off it empties that means that most Ram disk utilities need to essentially recreate the drive when they're launched and every time you boot the drive needs to be refilled with whatever you want to store on it from a reserved spot on your system Drive a process that is bottlenecked by the aforementioned system drive and can therefore be quite slow then if you update anything while using the RAM drive it will need to commit those changes back to your system drive when you shut down by dumping them from the RAM disk and then of course if the system shuts down unexpectedly then you're in for a real problem because any change is not committed like a savegame or a file are just gone but in spite of all those challenges many performance enthusiasts and gamers remain committed to trying to make RAM drives as practical as they can be and one such enthusiast at startup Tim on Twitter thinks he's finally done it at least for gamers with a product called dim Drive now to be clear the underlying technology is exactly the same here there's no voodoo magic but the claims that dim drive makes about simplifying the process and optimizing the application itself for gamers intrigued me so I got on the phone with Coursera had them send me a 32 gig kit at their vengeance lpx ddr4 24 hundred megahertz round which Iran in quad-channel on an Asus x99 AWS motherboard free basically as good as it could possibly get scenario for dim Drive to really prove to me if it's worth the money so first a quick tour of the product though on the main screen is an auto populated list of the Steam games that you have installed the star allows you to easily sort whichever ones you want to the top the size shows you how much RAM you'll need to cash that game the wrench to the far right lets you choose whether to auto load that game and whether to enable real-time file synchronization which should knock on wood protect you from progress loss in an unexpected shutdown scenario and a less Ram option to show dim drive where the important files are to cache for this title so you can boost performance potentially without caching the entire game and therefore getting a little bit more mileage out of your realm finally the slider next to the wrench tells that game whether to cash or not in the apps tab you can add non Steam games or any other applications you want by manually dragging them onto the window or right clicking and clicking Add then the settings tab lets you configure your drive letter the size of your dim drive your startup options and your color scheme finally at the very top of the window is the master slider to turn dim drive on and off and I'll give this to Tim this is a lot simpler to configure than ramdisk software that i've used in the past but even if it works as intended is a ramdisk really a sensible upgrade for gamers storage speed is well-documented as having literally zero impact on your FPS so the thing to look at then is loading times we ran four different scenarios a one terabyte 7200 rpm WD black hard drive a one terabyte Samsung 850 Pro SSD that same SSD with Samsung's rapid Ram cache enabled we needed to show several results for this one by the way to show how it learns over time and finally dim drive with the full game loaded into memory and this conclusion probably won't surprise anyone who has fooled around with RAM drives before but it was still an interesting experiment for me to run and make a video about since I wanted to play around with the software anyway I really think that dim drive has made enormous strides towards making RAM drives easier to use but that doesn't change that the most compelling storage type for an enthusiast pc or gaming PC is still an SSD it's only a few times more expensive than a hard drive and makes your entire system much more responsive not just game or application loading times and it costs about 1/10 what you'd spend per gig to put your games in RAM every time you boot up now if dim Drive was like 10 bucks and you're the kind of person who really only plays one or two games and enjoys being the you know the first one to the heli like I said before then it would actually get a pretty strong recommendation at $30.00 though it's a little too much for me to buy for personal use though speaking of things that cost too much razors but fortunately today's episode sponsor Dollar Shave Club has got that shiz taken care of for you all you've got to do is for a very affordable monthly fee sign up for Dollar Shave Club and they will ship you razors and other shaving supplies straight to your door once a month so you don't have to get off your butt go to the grocery store find someone to unlock that freakin safe that they keep the razor blades in for some reason I've had people tell me well Linus they don't keep the razors in a behind a lock-and-key at my store well you know what they do here I actually have footage of it but maybe we can find or maybe we can but the point is pain in the butt to go get these supplies and on top of that you're paying way too much for them Dollar Shave club's razors are high quality and they've got a bunch of other great shaving supplies too including their dr. Carver's shave butter as well as their aftershave and their one wipe Charlies which actually aren't shaving supplies unless you were trying to clean your butthole so you could shave that one wipe Charlies our butt wipes for men by the way in case you couldn't figure that anyway I don't remember where I was going with this guy's it's dollarshaveclub.com slash lioness to start saving time and saving money on your shaving supplies it's good stuff check it out it's linked in the video description and I think we're pretty much done here can't believe I was talking about butthole shaving I mean what is this what does the show come to anyway guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment below and let me know about dim drives or just feelings you're just more complicated than this as always also linked in the video description you can support us you can buy cool t-shirt like this one give us a monthly contribution so we can make videos like this one or just there's one other thing right change your Amazon bookmarks one with our affiliate code so we get a small kickback whenever you buy stuff that kind of stuff helps set a lot thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe you