Supercharging Windows Disk Speeds
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- Опубликовано: 7 июн 2021
- Retired Microsoft engineer Davepl explains how to add L2 Cache to a Windows system, such as Optane in front of NvME, or NvME in front of SATA. Radically increase your disc performance with a new approach to disc caching not previously available for Windows!
Dave explains the how and why before showing you step by step how to configure an L2 cache. He demonstrates L2 caching on Hard Discs, RAID Arrays, NvME SSD, SATA SSD, and using a RamDISK. 
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WOW! You wrote Hypercache for the Amiga?!
Best. Program. Ever. Written. For. The. Amiga.
I could have used that if I'd have even heard of it.
Wonder if he has a few copies laying around and will it work with workbench 3.2?
@@sinclairspeccy5376 I still have a box of them! Not sure about 3.2 though!
@@RiversJ first time I've heard of it also? ,did it ever get any mag. reviews in the day?
Well i live in Finland, looking through at the magazine that published computer articles (translates to microbit) there is a mention about it few years after. Too bad i never caught it, though i was far too young then to even buy it overseas heh
// Yes, I could use virtual destructors, but I could also poke
// myself in the eye with a sharp stick. Either way you wouldn't
// be able to see what's going on.
Still one of the best comments I've seen in the taskmgr sourcecode lol
Accurate. Virtual destructors (potentially, not always) make the programmer's life easier, but not the one reading the code, so why do you care, future code reader?
@@rich1051414 Dave actually put this in the source code for the original task manager.
Something people don't know about heavy read-write IO is that the SATA protocol is not full-duplex while the PCI-Express is hence one additional reason why an NVME drive will perform better in heavy IO exchanges.
I didn't know that. Thanks.
Does it wear the SSD modules ?
@@fridaycaliforniaa236 Writing SSD does wear them, in fact most SSD have a specifications called "TBW" (Total Byes Written) and it's typically 1000x larger than the capacity of the SSD. That number doesn't depend on whether you interface the SSD with SATA or PCIe, it's a property of the SSD cell design.
Dave, I just wanted to say that your work directly impacted my life at a young age, and even though I’m (pretty sure) we share a spectrum of reasons why we like knowing how things tick, as a current day Systems Administrator I would not be who I am if you weren’t who you are… so one internet stranger to another, thank you. Thank you.
It's fantastic when bright stars can improve our compute universe.
The hard part is always identifying issues (bottleneck latencies) and cost effective solutions.
Thanks Dave 🤗
LOL! Spectrum. I see what you did there. Well played.
@@noway9880 I can't take credit, it's Dave's line. He said it in the 1st video of the 'Secret History of Windows Task Manager' series. :)
Thanks for including the bloopers! Now I don’t feel like I’m a total muck up! Those moments are just part of the process.
So true!
Man, I love the hustle using your software as a trojan horse to get into Microsoft. I bet that conversation went from "Why should we hire you?" to "How can we Not hire you? You start tomorrow"
"I am a cache enthusiast"
Or is it cash?
A.D.I.D.A.C. Srsly.
Cache seems simple yet it is still a super real limit for TODAY datastreams - The cache topic is far from exhausted... applications of cache simply need to be taylored ti meet practical problems 🙂
@@glasser2819 i have no idea what you were trying to say
@@matthewpalmer9820 was eluding to the paradox that a few system pipes remain starved so latest NTKernel still appears to be "driving with the brakes on".
The mug masking future timestamps never gets old. Haha.
Tried PrimoCache yesterday. Had tiny Optane laying around, so an L2 cache was a no-brainer. Holy smokes! 11 GB/s sequential RW and a couple of gigs RW in random 4K! And the system feels snappier too. Running big apps like Photoshop or starting virtual environments in VirtualBox never felt so quick! Regarding being a cache enthusiast - there's something magical in caching - like breaking laws of physics. Making something faster than it should be. I felt the same thing when I learned about hash maps: "O(1) access? That's crazy!". Thanks for this video, Dave!
The software is insanely good, used if for a few years now. Any spare SSD will do same job with PrimoCache, the larger the better to improve wear levelling. Also their granular controls help calibrate better efficiencies too.
Good choice 👍🏼
@@britishagent There is a difference, Optane is like RAM as far as it doesn't wear out. Also, I use about 2 - 4GB of RAM for cashing, get 11,000MB /sec on my i7/3770 CPU and 9,000 - 10,000 read at times! I also have a Samsung 960 PCIe as my main drive so it should last much longer. If only I could find a way to force caching for C: not the many things windows 8.1 refuses to cache. Write back set to 360 seconds so almost like RAM disk.
Back in '92 I designed my own printer buffer, a HW+SW based solution in a form of the box with controller hooked up between Centronics interface and the slow dot matrix printer. The box contained 8052 MCU based controller with typical sram but also 4MB of DRAM on the SIMM. I remember how drastically it reduced time for OrCAD spitting data to printer during schematics printing. From minutes to few seconds. I was still in college and DIY kit made based on this let me go through school without asking parents for help.
Was it in USA or Poland? I've noticed on your channel your first program called "silnia!" so you're obviously Polish (your channel name makes it obvious too).
Love the bloopers at the end, reminds me of Technology Connections :D
ooh another Tech Connections viewer... high five 😅
JAZZ
[ridiculously smooth jazz music]
@@HassanSelim0 Infinitely smooth RAM
I love it when a content creator is humble enough to show us their mistakes.
Lol, this is just gold. When a man who wrote cache software in the good ol'days is exited about a software program i have been using for many cycles...🥳.
This is almost a letter to me to remember to buy a few more licenses for my other comps..
Dave, thank you for your true heart. Great work, keep it going....
Have used primocache for a good couple of years and its quite impressive, I have a 8gb L1 and use an old NVMe as L2, to support a couple of large mechanicals. a good 88% hit rate. My OS sits on a Pcie 4.0 NVMe which sits outside the cache setup as its fast enough. Best few bucks I have spent in a while , nice vid Dave!
that actually was the fastest 20 minutes I've experienced in a long time. the only thing better probably was finding out that photo induction is going to start uploading videos again. That was a really cool topic!
I remember being obsessed with ram drives and once I was able to get my hand on some actual hard server iron and realized I can have up to 128 gigabytes of RAM I started going crazy with ram drives.
one thing I have to admit is that the speed and power of game consoles compared to some computers really did surprise me. When you realize almost most of their content is all completely running from Ram you start to realize why these game systems are able to perform as they do reliable and even overtime. I can't say the same about some computer programs or platforms.
Game consoles have a highly optimized operating system. The manufacturer knows exactly what the hardware is so they can write the OS to support only that, with no need for an API to support installing drivers for different GPUs or sound etc. Thus there is a lot less overhead so it can get by with less RAM.
@@greggv8 My favourite fact to point out is that the Xbox 360 has only 512MB of RAM, really makes you realize how optimized the storage usage is on them.
Been using Primo cache for around 1 year and it is awesome. Great video Dave
The Windows NT cache manager is a strange beast. It's most definitely NOT a traditional block cache. It's actually file-oriented, allowing fun things like caching network files. The filesystem, cache (Cc), and memory (Mm) systems are deeply intertwined. Lots of black magic and legacy baggage. Rajeev Nagar's filesystem book from 1997 is probably still the best conceptual documentation available, but is seriously out of date on the specifics.
I've been using Primocache for about eight years on all my PCs. It's an amazing piece of software that does exactly what it purports to. It is particularly useful for systems still using HDDs, as you can use an SSD as L2 cache and really speed up booting and application performance. I hope this video gets them some more business, as they deserve it. Romex is a great company and their forum is active and Support very helpful.
It's out of date now because ssds have now become cheaper than hard drives so there's no purpose
@@pilotavery my little beginner friend, no one buys HDD today just to use a software to gain a little speed, this is for people that ALREADY have HDD and want a little more performance.
I know people that handle a lot of data and still have 10TB hdds because, guess what, ssd is not so much cheaper when you scale size...
@@fabiorodrigo3638 Eh, at $40/TB for nvme, I put in 16tb of nvme and it works pretty well for me :)
@Avery Kucan I use it on my gen 4 NVME raid array
does PrimoCache help with file transfer read and write speeds? Because that Is what I'm looking for. I notice sometimes even when transferring a large file between SSDs that the write speed will slow down significantly or sometimes it will just stop writing for 30 seconds. I don't know if that is an issue with caching or an issue with TeraCopy, which is what i use.
Watching the new Dave's video for me be like: 1. Hit Like, it's a safe bet, 2. Relax and sit comfy, 3. Enjoy the ride with a smile on the face that won't go away for quite some time.
Hi Dave!
Thank you so much for making this video, it has really opened my eyes to the possibility of improving the caching (or as I'm more familiar with it 'tiered' storage) on a desktop system. This is a concept I'm very familiar with from the enterprise space, where it is routinely used in SANs and even hyperconverged infrstructure.
Until now I'd assumed it wasn't really applicable outside of that context, but boy was I wrong! Now sitting pretty getting over 20GB per second reads and writes, thanks to caching into excess RAM that sits in front of my nvme RAID array, etc. Great stuff!
I really enjoy when creators put in the bloopers at the end of the clips. I connect more with them as a person. Dave, thank you for your videos
Ive been using PrimoCache for about two years. I had a chance to do Chia plotting with a 64GB L1 (ram) cache on an old Xenon. I didn't benchmark it, but the feature I like is trimmed writes that dont hit the SSD. Cheap, fast, works, pay once. Awesome software.
THNX .MostValuable Comment of this awesome video.
Caching is a tricky beast because it depends on the application which strategy that's best.
Write caching can be really scary because if it fails you'd get a lot of information ending up in the void.
I was an aspiring Computer Technician at the same time, who loved caching in MS DOS and it's so cool that today, I'm watching the guy who wrote it. So awesome!
I'll point out that Windows already has an amazing RAM cache of disk: SysMain (formerly known as SuperFetch). Any unused RAM is asked to serve as a disk cache, and Windows knows that you are going to be loading 13 GB of textures from your favorite game soon, so it goes ahead and caches them. What Windows (mostly) doesn't have is cache tiers. There used to be ReadyBoost, which could use a USB stick (and its 0 ms access time, although low bandwidth) to serve as a cache for your OS drive. But ReadyBoost will not offer to cache other drives in the system, and with everyone running their OS and pagefile on an SSD: ReadyBoost sort of faded away.
PrimoCache is useful in offering to cache non-OS disks onto a faster medium (SSD or Optane). But if you're only using PrimoCache to cache data into RAM: you're just fighting with Windows.
Also know that Windows already has the option already to delay/buffer disk writes (Disk -> Policies -> Write-caching policy -> Enable write caching on the device). This is useful when applications need to do a lot of individual writes, and then they can issue the command ** FlushFileBuffers** to indicate that they want to ensure that all data has been committed to durable storage (useful for a database log). Windows even provides a feature to cause **FlushFileBuffers** to do nothing, and if an applications asks to ensure data is safe on a disk: Windows will simply ignore the request. That options is in the same place (Disk -> Policies -> Write-caching policy -> Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device).
So, again, PrimoCache has a feature that Windows already gave you.
What PrimoCache does give you, that Windows cannot, is letting you do all this with something between RAM and the Disk. It gives you cache tiers; so you *can* cache your spinning rust on an SSD, or cache the SDD on an Optane. Windows simply doesn't allow that - they defer to Intel RST and the like for that.
So which version of windows has that cacheing feature? win xp? win 7? win 10?
@@g6qwerty The caching feature mentioned in the latter half of the comment exists since at least XP I believe.
SuperFetch, and ReadyBoost, were introduced in Windows Vista.
I haven't visited your channel before. I really liked your "slow-paced" but in-depth technical explanation and knowledge sharing. Many RUclipsrs these days share stuff they really don't know anything about. To a guy like me, this was super interesting and I would love to see more. Thanks for the video. Subscribed!
Great article, Dave. Thanks. (I never did figure out what the fuss around Optane was but now I know...)
I've used PrimoCache for over a year now - can't imagine PC life without it. Purchasing it took a software "leap of faith" with all of the junk out on the interwebs but turned out it was worth every penny. Keep up the great work, Dave - I love your content. Take care all and stay safe wherever you are! [Although.... gotta admit.... I was born/raised south of Seattle, worked at a company just up the road from the M* campus in Redmond and dated someone who worked in the XBox division. Moved to the east coast almost a decade ago and everytime I watch one of your vids it makes me miss home just that much more LOL!]
I have independently discovered PrimoCache as well, and I love it too - the storage on my TR workstation is also tiered (NVMe, SATA SSDs and FC-backed 10kRPM SAS drives), and it helps a lot - especially when using part of the 256GB RAM for it.
I'm a newbie who knows nothing at all but now watch you constantly. As such a new fan I will share this (since you speak so well). The whole comprises the parts (comprehensively) and the whole is composed of the parts. Nothing is "comprised of" anything. At least for now. Wink
I love the outtakes ... I had forgotten about Hypercache ... made my life better ... thanks for sharing.
I'm surprised that PrimoCache isn't more popular. I've been running it for roughly a year now, with 2 of my 16GB as ram cache and 100GB of NVME as a long term cache. It's gotten so good now that I have all of my games on spinning rust drives. Now that you mentioned using Optane, I'm definitely going to have to get one of those.
loved the gig real on this one too. Makes you appreciate all the work that goes into making your videos. And is funny at the same time.
Thanks Dave, you are consistently enlightening, funny and awesome. I now know how to cache on Windows thanks to you! Wohoo!
Smartdrive was one of my favorite dos utilities. The reason for it is that I figured out its true potential. smrtdrv+drvspace==compressed memory for games using dos extender. And surely that was useful with 8MB of ram with games that needed 12MB.
Love the outtakes at the end. Shows humor and confidence.
Truly respect your channel and you because you explain tech in a way that a layman can understand. TWO THUMBS UP!
I've been using the server version of the software in this video (PrimoCache) for about 3 years now and it essentially turned a very slow server with dual 2TB SATA Hard Drives into feeling like a super-fast SSD based server. Now to be clear my server has 32GB of RAM so I was able to dedicate quite a lot of RAM to caching (about 16GB) but it was for me at-least a lot cheaper than getting an all-flash based system. Great software by the way, never caused me any grief. Just works as it should.
Smart-drive when used correctly was a great program I back in the day used an Oktek brand motherboard that had 8 Mb of dedicated cache ram fitted not cheap I might add at the time in the 486 days but using this cache properly gave awesome results in the days of old slow Ata 33 hard drives, back then I used a test program made by Texas Instruments to ascertain disk throughput and the results were outstanding, So there were a few of us out there that appreciated your programming efforts back then outside the Amiga camp
looking forward to the follow up on this one. great video again, thank you very much.
Being using this program for over a year , awesome program.
thanks for the suggestion here. Interested in giving this a try soon!
YU smart cookie! Thanks for the video and I love hearing about this stuff. It is so impressive how the best minds in the world have been brought in to tackle these things.
Getting 27+ years from your engagement ring sound like an excellent value on that purchase! Congrats to your wife and yourself and hopes for many more years.
Thanks for showing us something new and cool 😎 and an easy to understand explanation of the magic that makes it go.
That smartdrv cache program you workled on back in the DOS days was a godsend. Used to play vgaplanets and it would process the turns in like 30 seconds compared to 5-8 minutes without it.
That's awesome. Need to image my system and backup before I'd give it a go. Love the outtakes, glad to know I'm not the only one this happens to when talking to camera.
Thanks Sir! I found an Ebay deal on an Optane, got it installed and working today. My main animation box is now way snappier. I'm playing with it to find the absolute best speeds but it is already like night and day.
I've been using PrimoCache for years and I love it. I have two caches. One caches a 14 TB mech with games on it with a NVMe and 10 GB of RAM, the other caches two 1 TB NVMe drives in RAID 0 with 20 GB of RAM (for my most used games). I have them set up for "read only" since I don't install games often but focus instead on well, read, obviously.
Wow this is great. Do yout really find that putting Ram Cache on a Raid 0 of M.2 NVMEs is necessary? I am thinking of changing my C: and :D Nvmes to a single Raid 0 disk and only divide it beween C and D by volumes on OS and use it as a CACHE to a raid0 of standard SSDs. But am still not sure if dedicating ram to it is a must
David you a wealth of good shit! Just found your channel and lovin it! Keep it coming!
I was waiting to see what you brought up - but was not surprised when you revealed it was Primocache. Primocache with optane for L2 is indeed awesome.
What's even more incredible is their Windows server version - at $350 it's a steal, especially when compared to their competitors. It's a fraction of the cost. I help support some friends who own small businesses and Primocache turbocharged their servers. Speed of SSD, reliability and capacity of hard drives and way more cost effective than coughing up SSDs for everything (and then replacing them more frequently than hard drives too).
It's seriously good stuff and I probably annoy people by talking about it so much :)
Impressive random speeds. Nice to see a fellow Amiga lover. The Amiga was my all time favourite machine. Didn't switch to a PC until Commodore went bankrupt, sadly. Used to always have a RAMDisk on my Amiga as well.
I had 2MB expansion on my A1000 and always loaded workbench into RAMdisk. It was transformative.
Seems the Amiga is a computer many of us owned. In my case, it was a PC (MS-DOS) at work and an Amiga at home. My final Amiga was a 3000/040 CPU, a 386 bridgeboard for DOS, and a program called "Shapeshifter" that let me emulate a Macintosh running System 7. Mac emulation was the only way the get access to a decent browser (Netscape) at the time. :-) Once Windows XP hit the market I made the switch. It behaved well for me.
I was blown away to learn you're the author of Hypercache. Much respect. :-)
Man, I love your channel!
Love learning from you!
Dave you're awesome keep up the informative and entertaining content.
Love the video, Dave! Still waiting for the follow-up!!!
You've earned street cred with me knowing you owned and developed software for Amiga!
Cool! I was also an early adopter of ram caching. I just love how it can turn lame disk-intensive systems into useful performers.
really appreciate you bringing some of this esoteric/buried knowledge out to the masses. i think it's super important for Us (as end users, average people, tech enthusiasts) to start learning How all the stuff we use almost every day works, and it gets harder to find more tech-knowledgeable info that isn't buried in the WikiHow effect of people just putting basic instructions on their sites for ad sense clicks.
Lubricated source code, now there's a mental picture I never knew I needed, until I got it! :D
I once modified a disk cache and gave it more 'power'. It made the computer so much faster that it became unsuable!
I still have that same shrink-wrapped package that you gave me in 1997! Now that you're famous, I need to hit you up for an autograph! 😍
Thank you. Yes, please cover this topic. I'm trying to figure out the best options for optimization for photo editing workstation and you've explained alot especially in understanding Optain and possible congratulations on windows. It's all bringing back memories of in the '90s Daystar RAM card for Mac on loan for a few days to test, but was too much of a dent in one's wallet. It would take, i think 8 simms on a NeuBus card and the drive would have it showup on the desktop as a drive volume, really made working on Photoshop files so much faster.
Back in 1985 I wrote the disk speedup software for MP/M-80 Version 2 called "MPMPLUS". I sold it through "Dr. Dobbs Journal". It could be utilized by one of two methods:
#1 - Install an updated TMP which opened a blank file in User Area 16
#2 - Install a directory cache in Bank 0
#1 could speed up disk operation by up to 5 times.
#2 could speed up disk operation by up to 10 times.
#1 circumvented a bug I discovered in the MP/M-80 Disk Reset function.
Only buyer was Altos Computer Corp. They liked it very much but I have no idea if they shipped it with any systems.
Otherwise I simply installed it on client systems on an "as needed" basis.
By 1985 it was of course a product for a dying market, though MP/M was found in a number of odd-ball solutions.
When you mentioned the ST506 disk interface, my brain brought up the fact we had to use DEBUG to start a program on the HDD controller... I think the command involved setting a register to "C:800" and then a "G" to start running the format program. Good times!
Another great video and walkthrough 😀👍
Been using this software since it was called fancycache and was free (in beta). It's great seeing this application getting some love! great video!
Amazing! I wish I had seen this video long ago. But better late than never. Thanks!
Been using this for a long time.. the cache is very good.. also reduces wear on your SSD.
I have only half a clue what youre talking about, but I really enjoy listening to you anyway!
Great video Dave!
Damn I'm old... I tried to follow. Since age has lowered my IQ 30 points, I struggle ... yes my last test I had dropped to 156, wounded my pride. Then I did enjoy all those drunken nights. Enjoy your videos challenging... but best I send your link to my son , a product of free MS training , then after marrying a teacher , he went to college, systems analysis today. He will understand and I think learn even more. Thanks for the challenge keeps the last grey cells functioning...take care.
Love watching a good old Saskatchewan boy nerd out about SSD speeds.
The only thing I got out of this is that I need infinite RAM
I, for some reason that I will likely never know, put 32 GB of memory in my old FX 8350 system I built in college. That system is now my Mad Scientist Watercooled system, and has my Steam library stored on a hardware RAID 5 so I can (relatively) quickly download said library to whatever I'm benching on a given day instead of waiting for my 5 MB/s internet.
All of that is to say that 13 years ago me was actually a genius and was just setting up for present me to use a used Optane drive and 20 GB of memory as caching space for my RAID of spinning rust.
Just download some RAM from the internet!
Hi Daazed. I found DATARAM (up to 64GB) to be an exciting idea (8000/8000) and easy to install. But what to move over to the data ram and how was a puzzle. RAM: 128GB and 6 GEN4 NVMe drives put me in the poor house. AMD StoreMI won't use a dataram but a GEN4 Plus 7000Mb NVMe would be good. I would like to see a dataram on quad channel Vs eight channel. Best wishes on the ram.
I use 8GB for L1 cache, seems to be more than enough for my use. L2 is an old SATA SSD with the backing storage being my 12TB game RAID0.
@@DeltaNrOne why download it from the internet, when you can buy ram doubler at the computer store! for only 39.99 you can double your systems ram, it works, but it uses your hard drive spacee, so i dunno about using hard drive space for ram as a cache to speed up hard drive space, that would be like making a perpetual motion machine.
Dude I really appreciate these videos it’s kinda crazy it take a minute but then all the sudden what your saying just clicks with me a nice dopamine hit like you say lol.
Very cool video! Didn't know that you wrote hypercache for the commodore amiga! It was the best software I was using.
SMARTDRV.exe absolutely rocks! Back in 1996 I used it to set up our student PC lab Win NT machines in a few minutes versus an hour by using the biggest cache I could to stream the NT source files over the LAN onto the local disk. After some careful crafting of the SETUP.INF file the install was fully automated.
I tip my hat to you Sir on a job well done.
Love your videos! I cobbled together a cache with C and Assembler back in the 80's to use with HP's odd duck MS DOS system (HP150?) and the Iomega drives capturing int25 I think it was, that was so long ago I remember few of the details...maybe a few concussions along the way helped with that :)
An Amiga guy is always welcome and respected. Let's watch the whole video now...
Thank you Dave for for this video.
Love the picture of that sweet pontiac.
The before and then the after, absolutely beautiful! Now I want to know what it looks like under the hood!
I've been using primocache since 2018 on an AMD rizen 1800X. I cache 8 drives with 12 GB. It has been wonderful. Particularity drive to drive copies. I have never had a problem that I could attribute to the cache.
Supercharging Windows boot speeds is the MAIN thing I want. I'm not sure I can keep up with all your steps, but I will try. Just reading the Comments is informative! I will move your RUclips/website to the top of the list. Later I should make comments about DOS 5.0 batch files and how I still use them often.
Very cool. Thanks, Dave.
Using my Inland 2TB SSD which I believe has raid, my read speeds went up 4x and write speeds up 10x. Now to see if that is noticeable using games and such. Thanks for the video! I used 12GB of L1 ram and enabled Defer Write at 2 sec.
Awesome video, thank you for this!
I use an 120 GB Optane M.2 drive Cache with Primocache on an AMD Ryzen system. I also made a small 20 GB partition on the Optane drive to act as web browser cache for Chrome and Firefox as well as my system and user temp folders. All the other space is for Primocache. I have gotten great results with this setup.
Love your channel! Just love it!
As soon as you introduced the topic I thought ”I hope it's about Primocache!”
I used to use it when I just had a small SSD and large HDD. It definitely made a big difference on real-world performance when loading games. The first load would be slow, but after that they would be much faster since it loads a lot of the same data each time.
But after getting a large NVME drive I just run everything off that so I uninstalled Primocache.
For years I've been using bcache (on linux) to just cache the "small" reads to an NVME SSD.
Large sequential stuff can come from my "spinning rust" RAID array, and it also tends to prevent (for example) movie files from games that you will generally only see once or twice, being written to SSD wearing it down.
On my "game PC" I only use a 128GB cache drive (started with a cheap 12 euro NVME drive to see how long it would take to go through it's write cycles before deciding on buying a big one) And years later it's doing just fine. and for most games once you've played them once or twice you really see the loading times decrease a lot. (and you get less noise from the heads moving around to read all the small files). I think it's set up to cache stuff < 4 MB at the moment.
On my desktop system I have my OS on a 512GB sata SSD, and data on a 12TB HDD array, with a 512GB SSD as cache (also caching writes on the SSD to make certain things more responsive), and it works like a charm, even with cheap SMR drives.
A proper caching setup can really help with having cheap storage, and still having good speeds for your data.
btw, doesn't prefetch/superfetch on windows go cache your frequently used files to RAM again after a reboot anyway? I remember my disks being quite occupied after booting back when I was using windows on a regular basis.
Dave, I wouldn’t worry too much about presentation time. Some topics are complex and require a lot of explanation. As long as the explanation flows well, I don’t mind the long time it takes.
In contrast, if an explanation dwells and dwells and dwells .. a lot of time on the topic without advancing the audience’s knowledge or by deeply going into the minutiae, it is a waste of time, at least that portion of the presentation.
I think you strike a good balance; and it seems you catch yourself when you think you are going too deeply or are about to. That shows me you understand this basic principle. I bet a lot of other viewers also feel this way.
I look forward to the next video.
I've used RST on some older computers to use an old SSD to cache a spinner for years now and it works great! I can't believe it's not used more by people to speed up large spinners. Only issue is you can only use 64GB and the new versions of the software seem to be all about using Optaine to cache SSD and didn't want to work caching a spinner with a SSD. It was a fight to find the right combo of RST version to get it working.
Amiga A500 and B2000 owner here. Loved the Amiga platform.
Loving the outtakes :D
Yeh, i was checking out PrimoCache about 2 years back, trying to speed up some large rust spinners. The trial impressed me so much I bought the full version within 12 hours. Having 128GB system RAM on a dual Xeon worstation meant the machine is quite fast if you can throw the data at it fast enough. My cache is 32GB RAM, 256GB Samsung EVO SATA, and yeh live on the edge with write cache at 20 seconds :)
Windows 10 has an instant startup mode which is turned on by default, achieved by some cache trickery. Problem is, any connections to mapped drives across your LAN no longer work after a restart. It took a surprising amount of googling before I stumbled across the answer, turned off the fast restart and fixed the problem. The 20 seconds boot up time is a small price to pay for getting my old Iomega FAT32 backup drive back. With just a few more tweaks Windows 10 will be almost as good as Windows 7 lol.
Primocache user here. Works great. I have 2 2tb sata drives and an intel Optane 900p as the cache drive.
I was waiting when you would mention PrimoCache! Been using it for years.
Primo is truly amazing! Great performance improvements, especially when write cache is also enabled and you have a lot of RAM. But don't blame the tool if a blue-screen or power outage ever happens. The file-system damage can be catastrophic and beyond a chance to repair. Remember a tool does what you tell it to do. I learned that lesson the hard way. I did have a backup.
i have never had it make drive/file system unrecoverable, now, delayed writes not written... your SOL if you didnt have a fast L2 caching all writes before flush..if you did..you may be lucky and primocache flush the L2 and get most or all of the delayed write data written to disk....
but yeah... i dont recommend using delayed write on your OS drive.. games drive, dowload drives, etc, sure..boot drive..not really needed or wise... thankfully i know how to recover from this stuff via command line and have been able to when i made the mistake of using delayed write on my boot drive...
I have two 6tb HDDs I would like if they spin up less time (cause they hum). Also want to avoid having to wait 10s often when they spin up.
Would using only a SSD partition instead of RAM make it so you don't loose data? In an event of a crash, wouldn't the data be stored in the SSD?
Thank you!
RAM does fail occasionally, but maybe not often. You will be quite upset if your RAM fails, I assure you. It can turn a system into scrambled eggs.
@@SaccoBelmonte No. You need to back up your data regularly. there is really no guarantee beyond doing that. Any crash can make you lose data. in any part of the computer. and SSD's do fail, just like any other component.
@@SF-tb4kb Soft RAM failures are the worst thing to diagnose alongside soft motherboard failures. Y'know, where it gets kinda unstable but doesn't outright die.
Both situations result in weird bugs that are often hard to reproduce and still allow you to have a fairly usable system, it's kinda like driving a beat up car that only starts if you follow a specific ritual you've worked out.
And of course thanks to Sod's Law the second you go to claim it on warranty is the very same second it starts working flawlessly for a month or two.
Im very interested in anything thats makes my computer faster. Please make more. Thank you