What Luck! A rainy Saturday here, and a new geeky thing to try. Cool, thanks!

I got everything working as you suggested. WOW charts load faster. Previously I thought delays were due to the IQFeed servers being slow, but I guess not. Great thread!

I found the freeware Dataram RAMDisk worked fine for me, available here. You don't have to pay anything unless you want to make a Ramdrive that is more than 4 GB. I made my RamDrive 1.5GB and it has tons of free space. It is set to backup to my hard drive every 5 minutes, so I am not worried about losing data.

Of course, I couldn't stop there though... I moved my Firefox cache to the ramdrive too. (I'm one of those people that keep a zillion tabs open.) Old but still correct instructions to do that are here: How to Change Cache Size and Location in Firefox

Also, the junction tool you mentioned is not needed after XP, so on my win7 machine I got this GUI tool to create the links:
LinkShellExtension. I suggest that anyone who gets the LSE might want to read all of the documentation. Not only are junctions supported, but a WHOLE bunch of other options too.

Finally, in regards to SSDs, I have a SSD C drive, and a regular D drive. I manually moved most of my USERS folder to D. I did this so that files that are written to more often are not stored on the SSD, as writing to the SSD drive can degrade it over time. It looks like there is a better way to do that when doing a clean install, using something called "Audit mode" that I had never heard of.

Link to that info is here: Microsoft Answers Page

I've got a new bigger SSD on order, when it gets here I plan to use it to reinstall a fresh copy of windows to get rid of a lot of unused apps. I'll also use the link above to keep more files on the D drive.

And for laughs, I am including a screenshot of the results of HD Tune for my SSD, regular drive and RamDrive.

@bob7123
I am trying to set up the Ramdisk you mentioned and I'm curious. I want to move everything that is in the Documents\NinjaTrader folder to the ramdisk. Do I need to reinstall NT and redirect the installation to the ramdisk or if not, how do I set it up so NT knows to look for everything on the ramdisk?

Thanks,
Mike

Oh wait a second...I didn't read far enough. Looks like I need to get the LinkShellExtension

Well I'm at a loss. Using junction.exe as mentioned in the first post of this thread, I ran into some problems. I created a ramdisk and created a folder called db on the ramdisk and copied all the data from the NT db folder to the ramdisk. then from a command prompt I issued the following command,

junction "C:\Users\Main\Documents\NinjaTrader 7\db" g:\db

got this error

Error creating C:\Users\Main\Documents\NinjaTrader 7\db:
Cannot create a file when that file already exists.

also tried reversing and got the same error.
junction g:\db "C:\Users\Main\Documents\NinjaTrader 7\db"

so, I tried running the same command without a folder on the ramdisk but that only created a link from drive g: back to the drive c: folder.

What am I missing?

Thanks,
Mike

Well I'm at a loss. Using junction.exe as mentioned in the first post of this thread, I ran into some problems. I created a ramdisk and created a folder called db on the ramdisk and copied all the data from the NT db folder to the ramdisk. then from a command prompt I issued the following command,

junction "C:\Users\Main\Documents\NinjaTrader 7\db" g:\db

got this error

Error creating C:\Users\Main\Documents\NinjaTrader 7\db:
Cannot create a file when that file already exists.

also tried reversing and got the same error.
junction g:\db "C:\Users\Main\Documents\NinjaTrader 7\db"

so, I tried running the same command without a folder on the ramdisk but that only created a link from drive g: back to the drive c: folder.

What am I missing?

Thanks,
Mike

Copy the contents of the db folder to the ramdisk.

Delete the db folder on the C: drive.

Then use junction, it will create the db folder as a junction to the ramdisk path. The folder on C: cannot already exist.

Mike

Two of the files that I moved to my RAM disk are the SQLServer CE database files, Ninjatrader and Ninjatrader.Old. But the symbolic link from the Ram Disk to the Ninjatrader db file keeps breaking, with Ninjatrader then creating a new Ninjatrader.Old.sdf file in the db folder. This is causing all kinds of problems, because the folder being created by Ninjatrader is conflicting with the Ninjatrader.sdf file on the RAM disk (Drive X).

Maybe this is because the period character is not permissible in the target file name. To test this idea I renamed the file on the RAM disk Ninjatrader_Old.sdf, replacing the period with an underscore. Then after creating the symbolic link to the db folder, I renamed that link back to Ninjatrader.Old.sdf, which is the file that the Ninjatrader application will be looking for.

So now, the name of the symbolic link is Ninjatrader.Old.SDF, but the TARGET (on the Link Properties page) is X:\db\Ninjatrader_Old.sdf.

It worked fine during first restart of Ninja, so next step is to see if the link is still there after I reboot the computer.

I would welcome comments or PM's from anyone else who is monkeying around with this stuff.

It is one of the few things that can be done to improve Ninjatrader's overall performance. The lack of interest is surprising.