Fancy Cache - High Performance - Reduced writes (Trim, No redundant writes) - Good by 'Write Amplifi

An Exception

An Exception

An Exception

Soldato
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Just thought you guys might want to try fancy cache out, it's currently a free beta.

Looks like I'v found a way to utilise my 18gb of ram. It's good for scratch disks, as you don't run out of space like a ram disk. Also good for gaming, as levels load (on the second time) allot faster than 3x x25-m's raid 0, also noticed gaming seems smoother, i.e. ZERO stutters or hitches and is now completely butter smooth in black ops.

http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/

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Is the L2 data cache persistent upon reboot ?

If it is then it would be a nice way to add an SSD to an existing system with mechanical drives without having to reinstall. Easy hybrid for the lazy like me.

I also thought there were solutions like this already ? Anyone care to refresh my memory.
 
Seems like I've visited superseed before - can't remember :rolleyes:

I'll have to revisit the idea of creating a hybrid system. Anyway L2 is what's very interesting with this product - L1 is nothing new.

Thanks for pushing me into looking at this again :(

MikeHunt79 said:
Nice, so is this software essentially a ramdisk then?
Click to expand...

Not really - but same principle.

Think of it as a ramdisk with a live passthrough to the physical disk
 
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MikeHunt79 said:
I see, sounds good.

I'm tempted to try this as I'm using an F4 as my system drive, hopefully I should see some good gains as it's 5400rpm....
Click to expand...

Essentially, unlike a ramdisk, your OS/Apps is actually being cached.
With a ramdisk, your essentially only telling a couple of apps to write/read to it, with the fancy cache method, all OS/App writes are written to ram, then written to disk later. Also allot of files are read from the cache instead of your hard disk sequentially in consistent chunks.

From my experiments so far, it also speeds up 'real world' write speeds of my x25-m raid 0, as they are:
a) writing data equal to the stripe size. So each ssd get's given 128kb to write from fancy cache, also the raid controller likes the bite-size chunks that it doesn't have to split or need to do added calculations.

Note:
If I set fancy cache to write 256k chunks to my ssd's, it actually slows them down.

b) The writes are consistent in size, and fit nicely within the memory blocks on my ssd's.
 
Subliminal Aura said:
Seems like I've visited superseed before - can't remember :rolleyes:

I'll have to revisit the idea of creating a hybrid system. Anyway L2 is what's very interesting with this product - L1 is nothing new.

Thanks for pushing me into looking at this again :(



Not really - but same principle.

Think of it as a ramdisk with a live passthrough to the physical disk
Click to expand...

Another program that kind of did a similar thing was 'mft'. but you couldn't use it on your boot volume, and it slowed down sequential speeds.
Also it was tricky to back up partitions if you were using it.
It was generally used to solve the stuttering problems with J-micron ssd controllers.
 
This thing is really cool, I've been using it for a couple of games I've had to install on a 1tb drive that wouldn't fit on my SSD. It's made a massive difference to STO where it looks like it's getting a 48% cache hit rate after 2 hours gaming making it really bloody fast :)

I've set it up with 2gb ram with read cache only on a 1tb samsung drive. 5.68gb read, 2.77gb cache hit for 48%.
 
Personally I wouldn't trust any program that uses large amounts of ram to buffer writes. What happens if the power goes off while it flushes the write buffer. Throw an overclocked system that's on the edge into the mix ...... Worst case corrupt files and a trashed OS.
 
Doesn't Windows do this already? By default doesn't it suck up all your spare RAM as a write-through cache - eg in the task manager for me under physical memory it says that 3.8 GB is being used as cached for me.
And if you select the "turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing" check box in the device manager, won't it be exactly the same as this app? I'm confused!
 
Been looking at this for making a hybrid drive for applications/data out of a 1TB 7200 + 60GB SSD. Does improve performance but is of reduced use as it does not yet preserve L2 cache on the SSD over reboots (it is planned though).
An alternative is to use a chip based hybrid solution such as in the latest deluxe sandy bridge boards or the imminent add-on Highpoint RocketHybrid cards.
 
How much RAM is recommended for this sort of thing? Iv got 6 gig atm would giving 1 or perhaps 2 gigs over to this leaving 4-5 gigs left be ok or what? What sort of ratios should i be looking at.
 
The Asgard said:
Personally I wouldn't trust any program that uses large amounts of ram to buffer writes. What happens if the power goes off while it flushes the write buffer. Throw an overclocked system that's on the edge into the mix ...... Worst case corrupt files and a trashed OS.
Click to expand...

This happened on my laptop when it ran out of battery without using fancy cache.

Also, an overclock is pointless if it isn't 100% stable.
 
Working well for me, a 5minute flush timer is saving me about 3GB writes a day on my laptop, and I'm getting a 30% cache hit rate. This is with a mere 800MB allocated for L1 cache (laptop only has 3GB RAM :/ ) Would be doing even better with a larger cache, as you can tell from the (Writes deferred, Urgent) stat.
zZCau.jpg


On my Gaming desktop with 2GB (out of 8GB total) cache I'm doing really well.
zWTzi.jpg
 
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