Dimmdrive :: Gaming Ramdrive @ 10,000+ MB/s

a must have tool, love it!

I have to manually remove the symbolic link for a game if Dimmdrive doesn't shutdown cleanly. Seems to happen due to a bug sometimes as well. If you don't manually resolve the issue no number of Dimmdrive restarts will fix the issue as recommended by the error message.

Also doesn't work for workshop items.

If I have to manually mess with the symbolic links myself then I don't need this app.

It works well with my little laptop with 32gb, I play most smaller games, other games I can put the cores in it.
There's a definite improvement, however loading into Dimm drive takes several minutes and loading a large game library (+900) takes a while too.

Overall, this works wonders with my laptop 😎😸

Dead. The official website is down and the latest version available on steam does not install correctly. It used to work halfway decently but not anymore so I cannot recommend.

before I start writing more, here's a small TLDR for those who dont wanna read.

Pure chaos, needs a lot of polish but does kinda work. I would hold off buying it, especially if you dont like experimenting.

if you do like experimenting with quirky software though, this isnt too bad.

---

Well I have had a kinda roller-coaster experience for the time I used this thing so far. the Idea is totally legit and used correctly it can totally make a difference in loading times.

The makers already stated correctly in the forum thread that loading screens usually are there because of one of the following 3 reasons:

- CPU Calculations
- GPU Calculations
- Reading Gama Data from your Harddrive

Dimmdrive attempts to make the last one a moot point by moving the game (or at least parts) out of the slow AF harddrive to the comparately MUCH faster RAM, both in sequential speed (meaning it reads big files faster) but especially in Random Access (especially great for games that have many small files littered around, mechanical drives are a serious pain).

The Keyword though is "attempts".

This thing feels quite unstable and unfinished, in a lot of ways.

It all starts off with the selection of applications and drive size and so on.

The approach is good if you use multiple things at once in the RAM but aside from that it doesnt really help and just makes it complicated.

The Idea is that you first select how big you want to have your drive, I recommend at maximum your RAM minus 4GB or if the game needs more ram for itself, your RAM minus 6GB (2GB for OS and 2 or 4 GB for the game respectively), also it's usually not a good idea to run this with less than 12GB of RAM, better 16 as a practical minimum, though for best freedom, better go with 32, bigger games will obviously benefit from 64 GB obviously.

After that you select which games you want to put into the drive and how you want them in the drive (less RAM mode is pretty helpful if your RAM wont fit the entire game, but putting it all into the RAM will probably save you a bit of a hassle and make it easier to use when dimmdrive gets quirky again.

after selecting what and how you put it into the ram comes the most annoying step of all. enabling Dimmdrive and waiting for it to fill your RAM.

Important: to make this faster DEFRAG YOUR HDD! (also helps with game loading times) [but not on SSDs]

depending on the size and structure of the files (fewer files that are bigger are "easier" to transfer than many small ones) you can make a cup of tea, or do whatever you like, this may take a while.

after that is done you may see one of the more annoying quirks. despite it being done, it will still show the cancel button and not allow you to launch through Dimmdrive. If you have put the full game into the RAM you can just go into your drive (usually Z) and start the exe of the game.

if you dont see the quirk, you can launch it through dimmdrive, although I dont know about the success rate of that. weirdly enough I have seen quite a throughput through my harddrive (which shouldnt happen as it only has steam games and unused files, so reading from that shouldnt happen) despite launching through dimmdrive, which obviously wont help loading times.

so I recommend for properly testing this to

a) have the game on a drive that doesnt get a lot of use outside the game
b) get an overlay tool that can display CPU, GPU and Drive usage, and keep a good look on it while you have a loading screen.

so if your loading screen just shows your GPU or CPU on 100% with no drive activity, dimmdrive has done what it can and while it may not annihilate the loadscreens into oblivion, it may at least help reduce them significantly,

I had experienced that for example in sword art online fatal bullet, which is LITTERED with loadscreens that feel like an eternity waiting to pass, although when dimmdrive actually did its thing it was a LOT less. I do some more testing with Ni no kuni 2, and update accordingly.

Update: in the testing with Ni no Kuni 2 I used the loading screen after you load a save, for running normally from HDD it was about 8 sec, with Dimmdrive (after getting it to work it was about 3 sec, but there are 2 important points:
1) my graphics card (RX560) certainly does get maxed out for a bit while loading and I certainly do get some i/o on the drive since apparently that drive hosts my pagefile and with only 32GB of RAM something will have to go in and out of the pagefile, so I can't stress this enough, for big games YOU NEED A LOT OF RAM.

to explain the pagefile for a second, it basically is a special file situated on any drive (by default the OS manages the Location and size) which gets used to store data especially if you have less RAM available. usually this is designed to prevent system crashes due to too little RAM left, but considering it's usually on an HDD, it's SLOW. so if your system has to go to the pagefile things will go a LOT slower than normally, which is why some users may see the performance getting WORSE by using dimmdrive.

as an endline I cant say much more than I TLDR'ed already.
it's mostly an unstable as hell beta, but when it works, it can help drastically, although this is sadly not a state where I can say that I recommend it in this black and white world of steam reviews, If I could rate it on a scale from 0 to 10 I would probably give it a 3 or 4, but the lack of polish and stability took a lot of points, maybe the old version could have scored better.

This product has actually managed to render one of my games, Nier Autonoma, unplayable. I have reinstalled it and restored backups, but thanks to DimmDrive, the game will not run without DimDrive running.

What's more? It takes FOREVER just to load the games through DimmDrive to begin with. What's the point of speeding up load times if it takes 5-10 mins to load the whole game into memory? Here's an article from Corsair explaning the ultimate problems with this product, beyond, of course, games just out-right malfunctioning PERMANENTLY.

http://www.corsair.com/en-us/blog/2015/april/dimmdrive_review

Though I was hoping this utility would be something useful for me, in my experience with it I can not recommend it. *Update: See the *Edit note towards bottom. At one point I was supportive of the Developer of this software, but now I certainly won't want to support a Developer who blames the Users for their defective / buggy software. So, WARNING, stay well clear of this software and don't support Devs who blame the Users for bugs and issues with their software.

* It doesn’t list all of my installed games - as I write this review, I have 449 games / programs installed via Steam, but DimmDrive is only listing 394 of them. That’s a big chunk of games (55 of them) that I’m unable to access with DimmDrive.

* Many of my games I've tried simply do not work (won't load or crash-on-loading) with DimmDrive, or some games may seem to work at first but then crash. Without using DimmDrive, those same games will work fine.

* DimmDrive does not properly name / list several of my games. For example; Installed via Steam and in my Steam library I have a game named “Next Car Game: Wreckfest”. However, it doesn’t show anywhere on the games list in DimmDrive, either alphabetically or by trying to type in a word search in the filter. However, scrolling through the list of games on DimmDrive, by chance I happened to notice the tiny game’s avatar-image of a car. But the game is listed as “Bugbear Entertainment”. WTF? How would I know that DimmDrive would so horribly misname that game? It was only by pure luck I noticed the tiny graphic that I realized it’s for the “Next Car Game: Wreckfest” game. I have the same problem with several other games too, which makes it rather difficult to find them.

* The DimmDrive window is soooo small and there doesn't appear to be a way to re-size or enlarge it or to enlarge the games-avatars or the size of the text. Be prepared to lean in close to your monitor to see things in the DimmDrive window and to do a lot of scrolling. :p

* I had to jump through hoops, doing several restarts of my computer, then finally manually going into the Windows Services to fiddle around with DimmDrive’s settings there to get the utility to launch (as it was often giving me error upon starting Windows, or I had to manually go into Windows Services to start, or restart, the DimmDrive Helper to be able to launch DimmDrive).

* DimmDrive outright broke some games I tried with it (which makes me rather nervous to continue to try it with more games). Basically what seems to happen was in those cases was most of the game files did not properly sync back to their standard folders when either DimmDrive crashed (or caused the game to crash) or when simply closing the game and closing DimmDrive. Luckily I’m fairly computer savvy and was able to manually fix those games on my own, but it was quite a hassle and shouldn't have happened to begin with.

* DimmDrive's "real-time sync" simply didn't seem to work properly with some games I tried it with, resulting in game-progress not being saved, this meaning the next time I went to run that game, I needed to re-do / re-play a big portion of the game I had already played to get back to the same point. When running the same games without DimmDrive, I could save my progress for those games fine.

* Of the several games I did happen to get working with DimmDrive, in most cases there was no (or very little / miniscule) noticeable increase in loading speed.

* In some cases where I’ve tried using DimmDrive with a game, and it seemed things worked ok, and I wanted to do some recording of my game-play, my recording software would tend to crash (or not even load in). However, if I ran the game without using DimmDrive, I was able to use my recording software fine.

* After un-installing DimmDrive, one day when looking at running services via Windows Task Manager, I noticed that a DimmDrive Helper service was forcing itself to run with Windows and running in the background. The only way I could find to stop this was to go into Windows Services and set the DimmDrive Helper service to Disabled. There doesn't seem to be a simple way to fully remove this service and it should NOT be there after uninstalling DimmDrive, so this is yet another bug and problem with the DimmDrive utility.
~~~~~~~~~~~

Overall, for the rather high price, the various issues I’ve had with DimmDrive and that the games I was able to manage to get DimmDrive to work with in most cases there wasn’t any noticeable difference in loading speeds, for me it’s not really worth it.

So, unfortunately I can’t recommend DimmDrive.

Sorry DimmDrive Dev. I’m just being honest with my experience of DimmDrive. I know that you have made some fixes & improvements since you originally release it on Steam, but I still have several issues with it.

*Edit: Quote from StartupTim [developer]"... everything you mentioned is more an issue of user intervention than an issue with the program..."

I really don't appreciate the Developer trying to blame the Users for the problems the software causes or its bugs. And no, it's not MY fault that DimmDrive is buggy or causes the problems it does. And I've already wasted too much of my time to bother any more with this defective software.

The price tag on this is too much for the very VERY small increase in speed you get. It is easy to use but just doesn't make a noticeable difference. Price kills it for what you get.

Dmmdrive is not worth a cent. This app is basically like RAMDISK program which is free !
In the selected game makes the sea of shortcuts and on each restart STEAM start twice! :( .USB-3 Turbo is free (does not work) and benchmark also which essentially not exists.
If you could return the product i wood immediately , as it is all it offers is free in support for your hardware !
This is hoax 28 € robbery that is not working properly!
And my tests. Ill will edit check yourself.

Firstly, unless your RAM is the size of a SSd you'll probably not use this often.
Secondly, this app did some changes to my RAM. Now all the large games i'm trying to run keeps telling me I don't have enough RAM. And when I opened task manager, my RAM is capped at 2.7mb. Even after uninstalling this app it's still capped at the same amount.

tl;dr This shortens load times and sometimes improves framerate on games with asset streaming. You'd better have the ram though, nothing short of 16GB will do you any favors with this.

If you've ever heard of a RAM Drive, you know what to expect from this; A super fast temporary storage solution with speeds that outclass even SSDs, cuts down on load times, and may even improve frame rate on games that use data streaming to load assets. It's not "Hurr durr paying to download more RAM." And you know that unless you use a virtual machine, 8 GB of that fancy 16GB of RAM you have won't be ever put to use otherwise (At least until Ubisoft releases their next unoptimized PC port, HEYOOOO).

There are free solutions out there but I bought this just for the convenience of automating the process of creating and deleting symbolic links, which I know how to do, but would prefer not to every time I wanna load a game onto a ramdisk. Lazy people like me who know what I'm talking about will agree that it's worth $30 to do that if you're really serious about using a RAMDisk. And besides, the time you spend creating symbolic links would be the time you take up in exchange for shorter loading times, making the entire concept moot without this unless you copy an entire non steam game over to a ramdisk manually.

The few games I have tried this with so far have seen satisfactory boosts in loading times; One game I used with it, Warframe, seemed to also have the random framedrops I was getting (That also happen after alt tabbing) shortened or eliminated entirely. On top of this, the initial loading screen in the hotline miami games were shortened from 5 seconds to like half a second. You definitely want to use this program with free roaming games however, as those have the largest assets to load.

And here's where the actual problem comes into play, not with Dimmdrive itself but with the very idea of using a RAMdisk. Seeing as your operating system determines how much RAM you can use (Thanks, Microsoft; Except what I actually mean is fuck you) storage space would be a problem, as with 16GB of ram, I.E. the maximum amount of RAM you can use with Windows 7 Home Premium, you hardly have enough space to store large assets while leaving room for non-partitioned RAM to do it's thing. Luckily, Dimmdrive circumvents this with a "Less Ram" option which lets you load specific files of a game through a RAMdrive, but to know what to move over you'd have to get Process Monitor to see what assets are being loaded the most.

Anyway, this program does what it sets out to do and does it better than most Ramdisk programs, and for that I have to give it a recommendation if you really hate loading times or think you can improve the framerate of a game with it. Unfortunately as far as I know there's no list of "Games that use data streaming" so you know which ones would benefit (If I had to throw a random example at the wall though I'd say unreal engine 3 games as even as you load into the map you can probably see the textures still loading; This would theoretically eliminate that) but if you know what you're getting into when you buy this product and are really serious about it then go for it.

The proclaimed real-time sync failed with several games, resulting in loss of progress and data. Does not clean up symbolic links properly.

In hindsight, a completely outrageous price for something that is essentially free, especially when its bells and whistles fall off and refuse to work.

On a positive note I did get a refund.

OK - so far a little bit gutted.

I have nearly 3000 games with over 2000 of them installed. Dimmdrive is only up to B on the list at the time of writing, I can only assume that it will take some hours to complete the available list of games?

I like the idea, and the few games I have tried, have so far crashed, not started or take an exceedingly long time to start.

I will update if things improve.

Based on my experience so far, its thumbs down and I will seeking a refund (or replacement purchase)

sorry dev.

EDIT: I have 32gig of RAM with 24gig allocated at the time of writing - I was excited about being able totally load games under 24gig into the RAM drive. Just hit the C's..

EDIT: Just hit the R's

going to bed.

Over all impression, save your cash not worth it.

I would recomend saving the cash you would have spent on this for either: more RAM, an SSD, or both.

• CPU: Intel i7-3930K @3.20GHz
  
• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 9.18.13.3182 (2GB) SLI
  
• 64GB Ram
  
[*]Windows 7

Over all impression, IS STILL, save your cash not worth it. Save for the RAM or SSD upgrade, or just save your cash for a rainy day. This is a niche-target audience program with questionable (at best inconsistant) gains in perform.

I've been using it mainly to put half of Dragon Age Inquisition (14gb) on the drive and have had no problems. I've had a bit more stability since using it. It seems to play nice with Origin games. Just use Origin or a shortcut to launch the game and not from within Dimmdrive.

I've used it for a few Steam games and Firefox with no issues as well. I'll have to play a few more games to see if it's actually affecting load times but at the very least I can see that it is utilizing my ram.

Note: This may or may not be a good idea for folks with less than 8-10gb of ram. Many games are at least half that size but you can try it with the "Use less ram" feature.

Edit: I just read that someone took 20 mins to load 7gb onto Dimmdrive. I just timed 13.7gb at 1 min 26 secs. It's not the program.

Unless you are a hardcore online pvp player, with 32 gig of ram onboard...
its not worth it.
The auto startup and activate features dont work, so you have to wait for the game you put into it, to load everytime you boot up.

edit after update 2.1.3
"Simply click your game inside Dimmdrive and it will launch via Steam!"
...........no sorry, that doesn't work

"Dimmdrive's "Launch on startup" feature now works correctly. "
no...... that doesn't work either

Not worth the $30 to see a minor improvement in game loading times. Read/write speed may be ridiculous but there is a very small benefit to running this. Recorded demos and config changes are not brought back into the Steam folder and are lost when the program is closed. Lost a really nice CSGO ace demo because it wasn't synced back to my Steam folder after closing. Will not be using this program again.

Most games are more Gb than you can spare on your RAM space (I have 16Gb RAM, have set 10Gb for RAMdrvie. Any more and Windows thinks you are running out of memory). So then you have to nominate which files are loaded into the RAMdrive. Then at the start of the session all the nominated files are loaded into the RAMdrive, this takes a minute or so.

It depends if the initial wait is worth the ingame load saves. And that depends on if you've correctly nominated the files to be in the RAMdrive that affect the ingame loading times.

I think I'd feel okay with having purchased this if it were $10 instead of $30.

To be fair, the developer fixed my two main gripes with an update a week and a half after release. Hopefully the pattern will continue. With time I'm sure the price will come down and the quality will go up.

I've got 32G of DDR3-2400 RAM and an Evo 840 SSD. I'm well beyond the recommended requirements for this thing, looking to shave a few seconds off load times. Expecting very little, it sill leaves me disappointed.

Problems that I did expect before buying:

- It takes a lot of RAM for this tool to be useful. I think 16G is the minimum for this to really pay off.

- It can take a few minutes to load a game from disk into the ramdrive. It takes longer than all the time it will save you combined. But you can walk away for the time it takes up front, and the time it saves later is while you're immersed.

Problems I didn't expect:

- The main window isn't resizable. I can only see 9 games at a time and it takes 23 full scrolls of the mouse wheel to get to the bottom. I should be able to make this window as tall as my screen.

- "Please disable Dimmdrive before adding programs or changing configurations." That's a nuisance.

- Starts with its own empty list of favorites instead of using your Steam favorites.

- Reads game names from some wonky variable that's not consistent with the Steam Library name. It shows me games like "mark_of_the_ninja" and "dont_starve" with underscores and puts "Back to the Future Ep 1" after "Back to the Future 105"

I attempted to use this software for various programs. In Civ5, if I invite someone to a game, it pulls them to the store page to purchase Dimmdrive instead, or "Invites" them to Dimmdrive. Not Civ5. Skyrim crashes after a couple minutes, Fallout Crashes after a couple minutes. Older games see no difference because they are already small.

Pretty much everything I've tried this on has problems that prevent me from making this program useful at all, so I've just chose NOT to use it. I feel majorly ripped off, and now I'm broke just because of some exciting marketing on Reddit. Next time I'll just give a big "Fuck off" and tell them to take their marketing elsewhere.

Save yourself the 30 dollars and do NOT buy this program unless it's for say, Photoshop. It isn't useful otherwise.

This is my 3rd edit in my review and I'm not happy.

1. After a long time of testing the software keeps crashing randomly.

2. It takes 20 minutes to load 7 gigs to the ramdisk, it's a lot of time to wait for playing a game.

3. USB3 Turbo keeps reseting the settings so the program doesn't take the files from the flash drive

4. While you're using it you friends only see that you are playing this an not the game you're actually playing

5. Inviting people to online doesn't work with this

I'm sorry but this is not worth the price it has and only benefits people with huge amouts of RAM (I have 16GB) and that don't turn off their computer or have really long gaming sessions.

UPDATE 2016: For all reading this, although I believe this software is good for some I don't think it's worth it in the long run. Games are becoming more demanding in disk space, and for this to be effective you need lots of RAM, at least 32GB for modern games or more, so seeing the price of SSD drives droping, you're better of buying one, install windows and games to it and you see a dramatic performance increase in all your system, it will boot much faster, software will open in mere seconds 1-2 and games will load very fast, not as fast as this RamDisk but still much faster than an HDD, in most games I dont have time to read the tooltips in loading screens with an SSD.

I would recommend this but ONLY IF YOU HAVE ENOUGH RAM. I have 12GB and this finally gives my spare RAM a purpose other than looking cool. And, it surprises me that several people kinda bash this program. I'm used to seeing PC gamers going nuts over the slightest of performance boost. This program will speed up loading times, and it can improve performance, but only if you think it's worth it.

Now let me describe in a little more detail...

This program was easy to use and understand, it integrates very well with the games that I have installed. You can set how much RAM to use and select the games that you want on your RAM. All you have to do is press a button to select what game (or games) you want to have loaded. It does have an initial loading time, but even that doesn't seem very long. I loaded a game that was 3GB and it took about 30 sec (maybe a minute at the most).

Endless Legend, a game that can suffer a major slow down toward the end of a game. I wanted to test this game out in particular, and while the lag didn't disappear, it did seem to help improve the performance. The game smoothed out some and I was able to play without worrying about constant lag.

here's my specs for those interested:
Windows 7
AMD FX 8320 (8 core - 3.51GHz)
12GB RAM
Nvidia 670 (2GB VRAM)
120GB SSD (just my OS and everyday programs)
2TB HDD 7200 RPM (where I install my games)