RAM Cache Drive / SSD Cache Drive?

[Dayle McNeela]

Ive heard recently that you can turn unused RAM into a large cache drive? ($GB Cache for e.g) and same for a SSD (20GB Cache for e.g)...

Well if this is possible, it would speed up start-up time, program and document use etc by far...

Does anyone know how to do this or have more information about it?

All help is most appreciated!!

 

[Traciatim]

Google Intel SRT.

I'm running a 60GB SSD as a cache drive to my 1TB spinning disk. It is a HUGE difference in general use. Windows already uses your RAM as a cache, which is why the first time you launch a program it takes a while, but if you immediately close it and open it again it's pretty quick. My boot time is more than cut in half using it, and all the stuff I use on a regular basis launches as if I had an SSD in the machine.

 

[Dayle McNeela]

Google Intel SRT.

I'm running a 60GB SSD as a cache drive to my 1TB spinning disk. It is a HUGE difference in general use. Windows already uses your RAM as a cache, which is why the first time you launch a program it takes a while, but if you immediately close it and open it again it's pretty quick. My boot time is more than cut in half using it, and all the stuff I use on a regular basis launches as if I had an SSD in the machine.

I have a 128gb SSD for my OS and programs, but i have a 2TB HDD with a 64mb cache... and i know windows uses ram as a temporary cache, but when you turn the PC off, the ram cache is wiped.. I want my PC to remember all the cache data...

 

[Traciatim]

Google Intel SRT.

I'm running a 60GB SSD as a cache drive to my 1TB spinning disk. It is a HUGE difference in general use. Windows already uses your RAM as a cache, which is why the first time you launch a program it takes a while, but if you immediately close it and open it again it's pretty quick. My boot time is more than cut in half using it, and all the stuff I use on a regular basis launches as if I had an SSD in the machine.

I have a 128gb SSD for my OS and programs, but i have a 2TB HDD with a 64mb cache... and i know windows uses ram as a temporary cache, but when you turn the PC off, the ram cache is wiped.. I want my PC to remember all the cache data...

There is no way to do that with RAM cache, since as soon as RAM loses power all of the data is lost. Intel SRT maxes at 60GB usable, but there are some guides online on how to partition your drive successfully to use 60GB of it as cache for a spinning disk and the rest as a regular drive.

There are also solutions for people who don't have an Intel board that supports SRT like:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/MyDigitalSSD-SSD-mSATA-Super-Cache,23900.html

http://www.sandisk.com/products/ssd/sata/readycache/

http://www.corsair.com/ssd/accelerator-series-ssd-cache-drives.html

The main problem with this solution is that it doesn't benchmark well. For instance if you do a random read test over the whole drive it looks almost exactly like the spinning disk, same with sequential read and write tests. Where it really shines though is in stuff that you do every day. Firefox is open and ready to type before I can move my hand from my mouse to the keyboard to type a URL for instance.

Since it's really hard to benchmark to show it's advantages it didn't really take off in enthusiast circles so you don't see it in mainstream PC's very much.

 

[Dayle McNeela]

Google Intel SRT.

I'm running a 60GB SSD as a cache drive to my 1TB spinning disk. It is a HUGE difference in general use. Windows already uses your RAM as a cache, which is why the first time you launch a program it takes a while, but if you immediately close it and open it again it's pretty quick. My boot time is more than cut in half using it, and all the stuff I use on a regular basis launches as if I had an SSD in the machine.

I have a 128gb SSD for my OS and programs, but i have a 2TB HDD with a 64mb cache... and i know windows uses ram as a temporary cache, but when you turn the PC off, the ram cache is wiped.. I want my PC to remember all the cache data...

There is no way to do that with RAM cache, since as soon as RAM loses power all of the data is lost. Intel SRT maxes at 60GB usable, but there are some guides online on how to partition your drive successfully to use 60GB of it as cache for a spinning disk and the rest as a regular drive.

There are also solutions for people who don't have an Intel board that supports SRT like:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/MyDigitalSSD-SSD-mSATA-Super-Cache,23900.html

http://www.sandisk.com/products/ssd/sata/readycache/

http://www.corsair.com/ssd/accelerator-series-ssd-cache-drives.html

The main problem with this solution is that it doesn't benchmark well. For instance if you do a random read test over the whole drive it looks almost exactly like the spinning disk, same with sequential read and write tests. Where it really shines though is in stuff that you do every day. Firefox is open and ready to type before I can move my hand from my mouse to the keyboard to type a URL for instance.

Since it's really hard to benchmark to show it's advantages it didn't really take off in enthusiast circles so you don't see it in mainstream PC's very much.

If a use a 60gb SSD for caching.. will it be erased everytime i shut down my PC? or will it remember the cache so its always super fast when i turn my pc on?

 

[Traciatim]

Google Intel SRT.

I'm running a 60GB SSD as a cache drive to my 1TB spinning disk. It is a HUGE difference in general use. Windows already uses your RAM as a cache, which is why the first time you launch a program it takes a while, but if you immediately close it and open it again it's pretty quick. My boot time is more than cut in half using it, and all the stuff I use on a regular basis launches as if I had an SSD in the machine.

I have a 128gb SSD for my OS and programs, but i have a 2TB HDD with a 64mb cache... and i know windows uses ram as a temporary cache, but when you turn the PC off, the ram cache is wiped.. I want my PC to remember all the cache data...

There is no way to do that with RAM cache, since as soon as RAM loses power all of the data is lost. Intel SRT maxes at 60GB usable, but there are some guides online on how to partition your drive successfully to use 60GB of it as cache for a spinning disk and the rest as a regular drive.

There are also solutions for people who don't have an Intel board that supports SRT like:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/MyDigitalSSD-SSD-mSATA-Super-Cache,23900.html

http://www.sandisk.com/products/ssd/sata/readycache/

http://www.corsair.com/ssd/accelerator-series-ssd-cache-drives.html

The main problem with this solution is that it doesn't benchmark well. For instance if you do a random read test over the whole drive it looks almost exactly like the spinning disk, same with sequential read and write tests. Where it really shines though is in stuff that you do every day. Firefox is open and ready to type before I can move my hand from my mouse to the keyboard to type a URL for instance.

Since it's really hard to benchmark to show it's advantages it didn't really take off in enthusiast circles so you don't see it in mainstream PC's very much.

If a use a 60gb SSD for caching.. will it be erased everytime i shut down my PC? or will it remember the cache so its always super fast when i turn my pc on?

On an SSD the data is persistent so it will work during boot under Intel SRT for sure (My boot time goes from about 45 seconds down to about 12 seconds . . . if I boot directly off the SSD it's about 10 seconds).

I'm not sure for the software caching solutions, but I assume they work pretty much the same way as Intel's SRT I just haven't personally used any of them. I've been looking in to them to speed up some of the other machines in the house and shopping around for a laptop with an SSD-Cache type setup for a travel machine.

Another option are drives like the Seagate SSHD drives which have the cache built directly on to the drive. I believe Western Digital has a similar solution but I haven't seen any on store websites available for purchase. Generally these are designed for laptops as they only have 1 drive bay so you can't really fit a full SSD and a spinning disk in them, but they work in the same manner.

 

[Dayle McNeela]

Google Intel SRT.

I'm running a 60GB SSD as a cache drive to my 1TB spinning disk. It is a HUGE difference in general use. Windows already uses your RAM as a cache, which is why the first time you launch a program it takes a while, but if you immediately close it and open it again it's pretty quick. My boot time is more than cut in half using it, and all the stuff I use on a regular basis launches as if I had an SSD in the machine.

I have a 128gb SSD for my OS and programs, but i have a 2TB HDD with a 64mb cache... and i know windows uses ram as a temporary cache, but when you turn the PC off, the ram cache is wiped.. I want my PC to remember all the cache data...

There is no way to do that with RAM cache, since as soon as RAM loses power all of the data is lost. Intel SRT maxes at 60GB usable, but there are some guides online on how to partition your drive successfully to use 60GB of it as cache for a spinning disk and the rest as a regular drive.

There are also solutions for people who don't have an Intel board that supports SRT like:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/MyDigitalSSD-SSD-mSATA-Super-Cache,23900.html

http://www.sandisk.com/products/ssd/sata/readycache/

http://www.corsair.com/ssd/accelerator-series-ssd-cache-drives.html

The main problem with this solution is that it doesn't benchmark well. For instance if you do a random read test over the whole drive it looks almost exactly like the spinning disk, same with sequential read and write tests. Where it really shines though is in stuff that you do every day. Firefox is open and ready to type before I can move my hand from my mouse to the keyboard to type a URL for instance.

Since it's really hard to benchmark to show it's advantages it didn't really take off in enthusiast circles so you don't see it in mainstream PC's very much.

If a use a 60gb SSD for caching.. will it be erased everytime i shut down my PC? or will it remember the cache so its always super fast when i turn my pc on?

On an SSD the data is persistent so it will work during boot under Intel SRT for sure (My boot time goes from about 45 seconds down to about 12 seconds . . . if I boot directly off the SSD it's about 10 seconds).

I'm not sure for the software caching solutions, but I assume they work pretty much the same way as Intel's SRT I just haven't personally used any of them. I've been looking in to them to speed up some of the other machines in the house and shopping around for a laptop with an SSD-Cache type setup for a travel machine.

Another option are drives like the Seagate SSHD drives which have the cache built directly on to the drive. I believe Western Digital has a similar solution but I haven't seen any on store websites available for purchase. Generally these are designed for laptops as they only have 1 drive bay so you can't really fit a full SSD and a spinning disk in them, but they work in the same manner.

WOW! 10secs is amazing,
I will use a 128GB SSD for my boot drive/software drive
I will use a 2TB HDD for my storage drive
I will use a 60GB mPCIe SSD for my cache drive

can you explain how I would set up the mPCIe SSD as the cache drive?
I will be using a Asus Maximus V Gene motherboard which supports SRT from what I hear...

 

[Traciatim]

If all your programs and OS area already on an SSD, what are you trying to cache on the spinning disk? If for instance you want to store all of your movies on your spinning disk and your OS and applications on the SSD there isn't much point in caching the spinning disk since the data doesn't really need the extra speed anyway and your access pattern wouldn't notice much difference.

Keep in mind I start my times after my BIOS junk is done so that's not actually from hit the power button to Windows login screen, it's from the moment my BIOS screen clears to Windows Login display. I also keep my machine pretty clean of extra startup junk since most of it ends up being trash anyway.

The actual setup is pretty easy, you install Intel's software, click the accelerate button, pick the SSD you want to use and pick the drive you want it to accelerate and it's done. Your drives must be connected to the controller that you can RAID drives on and the drive controller must be set to RAID mode in the BIOS for teh options to be available.

 

[Dayle McNeela]

If all your programs and OS area already on an SSD, what are you trying to cache on the spinning disk? If for instance you want to store all of your movies on your spinning disk and your OS and applications on the SSD there isn't much point in caching the spinning disk since the data doesn't really need the extra speed anyway and your access pattern wouldn't notice much difference.

Keep in mind I start my times after my BIOS junk is done so that's not actually from hit the power button to Windows login screen, it's from the moment my BIOS screen clears to Windows Login display. I also keep my machine pretty clean of extra startup junk since most of it ends up being trash anyway.

The actual setup is pretty easy, you install Intel's software, click the accelerate button, pick the SSD you want to use and pick the drive you want it to accelerate and it's done. Your drives must be connected to the controller that you can RAID drives on and the drive controller must be set to RAID mode in the BIOS for teh options to be available.

Because i will be read/write to the HDD? When i convert my movies I dont want them to takes 45min-1hr like they do on my laptop (I havent finished build the PC were talking about)
So wouldnt the SSD Cache for my HDD speed up this process?
Also I might run games on a HDD so would an SSD cache be worth it for these sorts of processs?

 

[Traciatim]

If all your programs and OS area already on an SSD, what are you trying to cache on the spinning disk? If for instance you want to store all of your movies on your spinning disk and your OS and applications on the SSD there isn't much point in caching the spinning disk since the data doesn't really need the extra speed anyway and your access pattern wouldn't notice much difference.

Keep in mind I start my times after my BIOS junk is done so that's not actually from hit the power button to Windows login screen, it's from the moment my BIOS screen clears to Windows Login display. I also keep my machine pretty clean of extra startup junk since most of it ends up being trash anyway.

The actual setup is pretty easy, you install Intel's software, click the accelerate button, pick the SSD you want to use and pick the drive you want it to accelerate and it's done. Your drives must be connected to the controller that you can RAID drives on and the drive controller must be set to RAID mode in the BIOS for teh options to be available.

Because i will be read/write to the HDD? When i convert my movies I dont want them to takes 45min-1hr like they do on my laptop (I havent finished build the PC were talking about)
So wouldnt the SSD Cache for my HDD speed up this process?
Also I might run games on a HDD so would an SSD cache be worth it for these sorts of processs?

Games, yes. Load times get vastly improved. Actual game play isn't very much change unless the game in question reads from sections of the drive a lot, but most games are designed to load sections/levels in to memory while you play to avoid disk usage as much as possible while playing since drive access is too slow.

The video encoding, not really. Writes don't generally get sped up by the process, only reads. Video encoding and writing is a pretty linear process as well, so even if you are reading from one file, processing it and writing to another there isn't much that the cache will do. since you don't read the same data again. The sheer fact that it's a 2TB 7200RPM desktop drive and a desktop CPU will end up being faster than most laptop setups for video processing.

 

[Traciatim]

Actually, it might be better for video editing that instead of the 64GB mSATA SSD you get a second 2TB drive or some other high speed drive to dedicate just to video writes and keep the data consolidated with something like Ultimate Defrag.

Depending on your setup and what kind of video editing you are doing it might actually work out better that way since you are already running your system and applications off of the main SSD. Are you trying to process uncompressed HD video or just doing normal family video editing off of a digital video camera or something?

 

[Dayle McNeela]

Actually, it might be better for video editing that instead of the 64GB mSATA SSD you get a second 2TB drive or some other high speed drive to dedicate just to video writes and keep the data consolidated with something like Ultimate Defrag.

Depending on your setup and what kind of video editing you are doing it might actually work out better that way since you are already running your system and applications off of the main SSD. Are you trying to process uncompressed HD video or just doing normal family video editing off of a digital video camera or something?

So your saying an mSATA SSD Cache drive with not make any significant difference to my storage HDD as I already have an SSD handling my OS and programs...

I'm not video editing at all (although I may in the future), I download films then convert them from various formats all to mpeg using format factory...

 

[Traciatim]

Actually, it might be better for video editing that instead of the 64GB mSATA SSD you get a second 2TB drive or some other high speed drive to dedicate just to video writes and keep the data consolidated with something like Ultimate Defrag.

Depending on your setup and what kind of video editing you are doing it might actually work out better that way since you are already running your system and applications off of the main SSD. Are you trying to process uncompressed HD video or just doing normal family video editing off of a digital video camera or something?

So your saying an mSATA SSD Cache drive with not make any significant difference to my storage HDD as I already have an SSD handling my OS and programs...

I'm not video editing at all (although I may in the future), I download films then convert them from various formats all to mpeg using format factory...

Correct, a cache setup will do very little to nothing in the case of movie transcoding.

It will also show almost no difference in watching videos or in general for a storage only drive. Where they really shine is boot times, application launching, games, and things where random accesses that are done on small amounts repetitive data.

You would be better off in that case to either skip the mSATA 64GB and sink the extra money in to getting either a larger main SSD to ensure you have enough space for both the games and applications there, or if you require more storage a second spinning disk which you can store static data on, while you keep one spinning disk for working on large data.

 

[Dayle McNeela]

Actually, it might be better for video editing that instead of the 64GB mSATA SSD you get a second 2TB drive or some other high speed drive to dedicate just to video writes and keep the data consolidated with something like Ultimate Defrag.

Depending on your setup and what kind of video editing you are doing it might actually work out better that way since you are already running your system and applications off of the main SSD. Are you trying to process uncompressed HD video or just doing normal family video editing off of a digital video camera or something?

So your saying an mSATA SSD Cache drive with not make any significant difference to my storage HDD as I already have an SSD handling my OS and programs...

I'm not video editing at all (although I may in the future), I download films then convert them from various formats all to mpeg using format factory...

Correct, a cache setup will do very little to nothing in the case of movie transcoding.

It will also show almost no difference in watching videos or in general for a storage only drive. Where they really shine is boot times, application launching, games, and things where random accesses that are done on small amounts repetitive data.

You would be better off in that case to either skip the mSATA 64GB and sink the extra money in to getting either a larger main SSD to ensure you have enough space for both the games and applications there, or if you require more storage a second spinning disk which you can store static data on, while you keep one spinning disk for working on large data.

Brilliant, many thanks for your help!