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does fc-cache cache the MFT of the drive?

Posted: Fri Jun 07, 2013 9:02 pm
by Incriminated
Hello,

i guess this is more or less a suggestion.

When i wake up a HDD drive from suspend (W7) by clicking on a main-folder of the pre-opened windows file-explorer it spins up the drive what is correct, but it doesnt let me access the MFT with the windows-file-explorer... before it continues to show the next sub-folder the HDD needs to be completely powered up.

I guess fancy-cache should be able to maintain accessing the MFT so i can explore the last state of filetable before it is completely powered up.

I basically think this in special should be one of the most important features, since the filetable is a very small chunk of data and can easily be permanetly cached.

How about? Or am I just maybe doing things wrong?

Greets

Incrim

Re: does fc-cache cache the MFT of the drive?

Posted: Wed Jun 12, 2013 1:36 pm
by dustyny
the MFT will be handled just like the rest of the data on disk if that part of the MFT has been read before it will be cached..

From what I gather you are asking for a previously requested feature which is precaching specific data (such a file or folder, in this case the MFT)..

Re: does fc-cache cache the MFT of the drive?

Posted: Wed Jun 12, 2013 1:39 pm
by dustyny
From what I gather you are asking for a previously requested feature which is precaching specific data (such a file or folder, in this case the MFT)..

Re: does fc-cache cache the MFT of the drive?

Posted: Wed Jun 12, 2013 3:28 pm
by Incriminated
I fear when the requested feature will be realised you have a possibility to pick a file/folder but not the "invisible" Filetable.

See a cache-software should cache-data. When my computer needs to spin up a HDD just to show me the ingredients of a Folder while this marvelous software Fancy-Cache is running, then I think to myself: such a pity... for what was it useful, you say? caching? :P

it isn't even capable of caching the filesystems-filetable... but this would be an enourmous benefit for HDDs and enfironment (power saving through suspend).

What Im trying to say, suspending unused disk is a good idea and you should take use of it, because it saves energy. The only disadvantage of that is that when you want to navigate the data on that disk to open a file, windows isn't even itself able to simply cache the MFT into RAM... so nearly nobody uses disk-suspend, because it needs a several-second spin-ip for even just finding out an exact sub-folders name.

With fancy-cache beeing able to cache the MFT, the user can navigate/explore the Disk completely, while system spins up the disk to prepare a possible data-read.

This would make HDD-suspend work at it's best without you mostly even not recognising a delay.

I dont know if it is technically possible, but i guess it should, because one might can tell windows "here the (last state) MFT", while one can tell the drive when it is spinned up "here's changes uses made during your spinup", to make it work even when user changes data during that spinup-time.

Re: does fc-cache cache the MFT of the drive?

Posted: Sat Jun 22, 2013 1:46 pm
by Incriminated
Can a developer/support official please state something about caching the MFT?

Re: does fc-cache cache the MFT of the drive?

Posted: Mon Jun 24, 2013 7:12 am
by Support
MFT data is also cached by the program. Actually program don't know what kind of data it stores.

Re: does fc-cache cache the MFT of the drive?

Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2014 12:12 am
by Uxorious
Is there no way for a filesystem filter driver to distinguish a block read/write coming from the directory parsing functions from the blocks coming from pure data read paths?

I have a few usecases (very frequent directory traversals to find a file, then LOTS of I/O to copy the file contents) where caching the filesystem METADATA but not the DATA would speed things up a lot.