Dimm Drive Review

DimmDrive is a Utility that lets you setup a RAM drive for games. RAM drives speeds up game loading by instead of storing the files the game need on a hard drive, it pre-loads the files in to RAM so when the game loads them it's quicker.  The downside to using RAM as a storage medium is that if you lose power, everything stored on it is completely gone with no hope of recovering it. So to prevent saved data from being lost; DimmDrive mirrors the data back to the actual drive so that you don't lose it. Another downside is that to be able to get the game files in to RAM in the first place you must first have to load the data which depending on how large they are can take several minutes.

Although I do have 32GB of RAM in my system; Most newer games, especially the big titles can be close to 100GB which would be expensive and not really be beneficial in terms of loading speed because it will take way too long to load all that game data in to RAM.

Here's the test results for the RAM Drive. As you can see it's fast with read and writes nearing 10GB a second which is very impressive compared to a standard 5400RPM hard drive but is much smaller in size. Since I have 32GB of RAM Im able to use about 24GB which leaves 6GB spare for the game and windows to use.

Although I haven't tested it with many games I have seen an improvement in games that take long to load for example Grand Theft Auto 5 usually takes me around 3 minutes to load from desktop to singleplayer and when I use DimmDrive to load around 20GB of the games data it takes about 30-45 seconds to load. To be honest im not sure why game engines dont take more of an advantage of this technology; If the system has loads of memory lets say 16GB and its currently using 2GB of that it would be wise for the game to use that to speed up loading and release it if there's not enough RAM. It would be very helpful for games if they had a slider that the user can control to change the amount it would use.