Size of L1 and L2 Cache (SSD)

[thomas]

hi there,

maybe a noobie question, but i hope someone can help.

i got 8gb ram. what do i do with it best?
1-2gb l1 cache?
1gb l1, 1gb ram-disk l2
1gb l1, 10 or 20gb ssd

i'm not shure what is "better" - to use for the above mentioned fancy for volume or drive? at the moment i have 1gb l1 and 1gb l2 ramdisk - what works fine for gaming (game volume is cached). but system is loading/running hard disk a lot when using more programs. so i'm thinking about fancy drive to have the most frequently used data cached (c:\ d:\ e:\ without to make a seperate cache for them). is fancy updating the cache? (on my ramdrive the cachefile doesn#t change the last modified date) i mean when i play some ours i don't need e.g. an sql-database cached - but when using a database, i don#t need game data.

so when have less ram (used for cache) what is the best option to speed up the system and to not slow it down, because of having less memory.

i hope my english was good enough and someone could help.

thanks a lot,
thomas

[thomas]

no one has a hint?

[mgb]

Which operating system are you running?

[thomas]

win7 x64

[mgb]

So I'd go with a large L1 cache - maybe 2GB or more. You choose 'Volume' or 'Disk' version of FancyCache based on whether you want all partitions on the disk drive to be cached (disk) or whether you want to specify a different cache for each partition (or no cache). You don't need to use any RAM disk. If you have an SSD, you could configure that to be a L2 cache of 8 or 16 or 32 GB.

[thomas]

thanks for your answer. that is pointing in the same direction i found out by trying. l1 with defer-write?
what's your opionion to caching to ssd? same say it "dies" earlies then.
what about caching the ssd? is this useful or not nessesary, because it's fast enough?
really thanks

[mgb]

IMHO, a L1 cache of 2GB will radically improve performance all on it's own. You could add a L2 cache of 32GB or more on an SSD drive, but I'd only worry about that if you use applications that do massive data access. That said, I've not tried it.

Regarding delayed-write - I personally don't use it for my C: drive - yet. I've been considering disabling Windows Write Caching, and instead enabling FancyCache's delayed-write - with a very small delay, like 2 seconds, but I haven't tried it yet.

FWIW, I use the 'Volume' version of FancyCache, and I create two caches:
1) 2GB on my C-partition, no delayed write;
2) 512MB on the V-partiion, with delayed-write set to 20 seconds. My V-partition is a 32GB partition where I have pointed TEMP and TMP, and also configured Chrome (my default browser) and Firefox (my alternate browser), to place their caches on that drive. This makes browsing super-fast. You could also point other applications that use caches and intermediate files to this partition.

The key thing is, as of yet I have not enabled delayed-write for any data I consider valuable.

[thomas]

thanks for your answer.

at the moment i have a l1 with 2gb and 60sec delay for disk (complete working drive c,d,e....). some things work really more fast, but somtimes my feeling is mixed. i think it's from the write delay. small writes or games are fine, but when extracting a big .rar oder .zip or copying large amount of data the hardrive is working a lot (more than without cache). speed isn't very constant and is jumping between 15 and 40mb/s (35 as middle value).
i try your 2sec delay and see what hapens.

[peterpan]

I'm not good at it!