FancyCache (Give It A try)

Communities Gaming
1

so, I have been posting this alot here and other places lately because I see people about to buy TINY ssd's(60gb is just to small, do not get under 128gb if you want to be happy with an ssd) 


http://thessdreview.com/our-reviews/romex-fancycache-review-ssd-performance-at-13gbs-and-765000-iops-in-60-seconds-flat/


http://thessdreview.com/Forums/ram/1924.htm

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18243823

there are many other reviews and threads about this out there, its been around for a while, its amazingly useful.

the more ram you can dedicate to it, the better it works(within reason) 

example,I set it up on a buddies system where he could only afford 1 hdd, we got him a 2tb toshiba, partitioned to 160gb for os and apps like ms office, the rest for games and downloads, but he has 32gb ram, (trade off for not getting a tiny slow 64gb ssd) I Installed drive edition of fancy cache, gave his drive(both partitions) 24gb cache, I could have used volume edition to give each partition its own dedicated cache but no real need in this case.

his game load times once a games have had load times drop to a fraction of normal speed, windows and apps used often load faster then superfetch ever manged....

so please give it a try, http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/ and post your results during gaming(run the perf monitor in background so you can see the cache hits ;) )

I do have a tip, enabled deffered writes and give it 60seconds, 600 is also acceptable (i know people who have it set far higher with laptops to save hdd/ssd ware) I set mine to 60 normally, it works great.

2

So, it's a ramdisk. I can see why it would give you better performance than an SSD, but as of today it's not economically advisable to buy 32gb over a cheap little 60gb cache SSD. I think you'll see a 3x performance improvement with a ramdisk (i think you can write at 1,500mbps not quite sure) but considering that a 60gb SSD with a 400/500mbps writespeed is going to give you near zero load times it makes to no sense to spend ~$200 on ram, when you could just buy a $50 8gb kit, and a $70 cache SSD then allocated the rest of the money into better parts for your system.

The performance difference (while huge) will be almost unnoticed, and you'll be able to cache a fuckton more than you would with ~20gb of RAM. Not to mention your cahce would wipe with every system reboot so first time loads would still be booting off your hard disk as opposed to an SSD cache that will adjust itself to the most frequently/recently used software on your system and will not be wiped with a reset (might be considered a negative to some people but if you're cache games/programs and not project files it should be a positive).

I think you really screwed your friend by buying him 32gb of ram. Unless he's also doing some seriously intensive video editing (which i doubt) he really got the short end of the stick.

3

 

 

 

ssd alone 

 

fancycache enabled

 

with ddr3 2133

 

 

 the top2 are ddr3 1333 cas9(slow ram) 

 

 

 

those cache drives you talk about ware out pretty fast if your a heavy user, I know, its why I dont have one, I also refuse to support them if clients have me install them.

I got tired of rma'ing ssd's that burned out/started to chuck errors due to heavy write cycles(writes are what ware out the ssd not reads) 

this is the kit we have, we both got it at 109.99 shipped shellshocker http://pcpartpicker.com/part/gskill-memory-f31866c10q32gab

so yeah i really ripped him off and fucked him over didnt i.....

also....honesty, how offten do you reboot?

Mines on windows updates, rare software updates or driver updates.....if your fully shutting down regularly your a fucking idiot....sorry but there is this thing called sleep mode or hibernate, they are both drastically faster then shutting down....


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibernation_(computing)

 

 also, he has over 400gb worth of games installed(all on steam) not sure his gb count outside of steam, he changes back and forth what hes playing fairly often, hence, yes he would burn out an ssd cache drive.....

ssd's are great if you arent gonna burn them out with heavy writes and only need very limited space.....pci-e ssd's tend to be more duable but they also cost alot more, and take up a pcie slot.

 

I do get the love of ssd's I just cant see their bang for the buck value if you cant get a large enough one to at least put your most played games fully on the ssd. 

want a better value, white lable 600gb vraptor 's http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-600GB-10000RPM-32MB-Cache-SATA-6-0Gbps-Hard-Drive-/170623106008?pt=US_Internal_Hard_Disk_Drives&hash=item27b9edfbd8

 watch they jump between 69.99 and 99.99 for those(they have a normal webstore but their ebay store is many times cheaper.)

my plan in the next few months is 4 of those and 2 silverstone 2x2.5" to 3.5" adapters, hooked to my LSI raidcard in a nice raid should make a blazing fast games drive :D  (currently Im just using a pretty slow 640gb hitchi i pulled from a dell a client needed upgraded) 


oh yeah, please next time, read the links before you tell me i fucked somebody over and that im an idiot.....(also afik, the l2 cache is persistant between boots, i havent tested, i dont got an ssd to test with at the moment, dont want to burn the one i got back from rma for a friend up testing it with heavy write cycles after all) 

 

 

4

in short tho, its not a ramdisk in the way you think it is, it dosnt cache files so much as data blocks.(forgot to say that above, and dont want to risk editing messing up the formatting in the post....(drupal forums suck!!!) 

5

Showed him this thread.....he found it very funny since hes got an ssd at work, hes installed fancycache and is using 1gb ram(of 8) to cache his 256gb adata 900 series ssd....the system also has a 2tb green drive that he gave 1gb cache, from what he says, it made the system far snappier for the work hes been doing, hes even talked the company IT guys to upgrade him to 32gb ram after showing how much faster his home system was for his work then his office system....

note: office system is a 3570k with 8gb 1866 cas9 ram, home rigs a [email protected] with 32gb ram, videocards are the same (they have to use radeon cards the software the company uses works best with AMD videocards or he would have nVidia as he personally was an nV fanboi), mind also, the software is compiled using intels compiler, so the fact its faster on his home system is kinda shocking....

also added to that the fact that its more bound by read/write speeds then anything else.....

in this case, I told him, for best results with his needs a raptor raid with ram caching would be faster but......their IT guys hate raid on workstains and desktops because of the trouble they had a couple years back with intel chipsets and raid(something to do with the raids constantly needing rebuilt) 

bah!!  just give it a try yourself, you dont have to cache the whole size of the game or app, give a drive a 1gb or even 512mb delayed write cache, see what you think after trying ti for a few days. (if your just playing games that dont patch during launch, just set it for read caching)