Fastest storage choice for gaming

[FlyinHellfish]

I'm trying to figure out what would be the fastest type of storage medium that can realistically be used to store a game on (Doom3 in particular) in order to reduce load times. Of course a couple of Raptors RAIDed together wouldn't be bad but I'm thinking along the lines of a solid state option. I want the game to load INSTANTANEOUSLY.

Options I'm looking at:

1)3GB or 4GB USB flash drives (expensive, is it fast enough?)

2)Compact flash drives (not so expensive but slow from what I can tell)

3)Getting a total of 4GB system memory and using 3GB of it for virtual storage (sounds great but is it possible in XP?)

This storage device would be used in addition to other system drives of course. It would strictly be used to store the game and related files. A solid state HD would of course be the answer but they are prohibitively expensive at this point and time. Doom3 requires only 2.2GB + 400 MB of windows swap file storage plus whatever the save games take up. The whole folder is actually only taking up about 1.84 GB on my HD right now. It seems to me there has to be a way to pull this off.

 

[RichPLS]

Two Raptor 74gig drives in a RAID 0...
I could not imagine needing faster, as they scream...


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Try everything...
Do not be afraid of failure, for this is how we learn and grow...
Live life to the fullest...
Do not regret what you have not yet done!!!

 

[silverpig]

You can get PCI cards that are dedicated ram drives. Or you can get programs that create ram drives out of system ram and show up as a regular old drive on your computer. That's probably the fastest way to go, but you will lose the contents of the drive on every reboot. I believe the ramdisk program has a feature that allows a backup to be made to a hard disk and then this backup is restored upon boot.

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