Recommended cache settings for 2TB HDD

[jdb2]

I have 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black running off of my motherboard's ASmedia PCI-E GEN. 2.0 6.0 Gbps SATA port. The motherboard is an Asus Crosshair V formula with an AMD FX-8150 CPU and 32GB of Corsair Dominator 9-10-9-27 DDR3-1866 RAM.

I do a lot of media encoding, gaming, mathematical ( eg. Mathematica ) research, RTL logic design ( Xilinx ISE 13.4 ) and programming ( especially compiling/building ).

These are my current settings :




Are these settings optimal for my hard drive and usage?

Might anyone have some suggestions about what I can tweak to maximize my cache performance? ( besides buying an SSD as L2 )

Thanks,

jdb2

[Mradr]

Yes and no.

Most of what you are wanting from this only increase with having a better cpu than faster access to the hard drive it self. At least with encoding, mathematical, and your Logic programming. Most of them can be increased with better ram (DDR 2400 for example) and better cpu (intel just released the new Ivy B chips).

For the rest, gaming, saving/playing the encoded media, and programming complinig/build/load time will increase with having a nice cache size. One thing a lot of these thing uses is Block Sizes a bit smaller than the 512KB. You can increase the block size to get a bit more performance going to 256 or 128KB.

The amount of ram would be up to you, but do note, chaning the block size also increase the amount of ram it'll take. It's a bit confusing what I mean by this, but you'll see when you try to change it looking at the "OS Managed MEmory - Free/Total.

Also, because you have a lot of ram, it might be better to use the LRU as the Algorithm instead. The other is usally used more for limited amount of ram where you will have quite a bit to play with. This will increase the flexability when you go to complier (sp, I'm soo sleepy atm lol) your code. It would also help when you saveing big chunks of data at a time (more related to the encoding when your're done and ready to save it).

Otherwise, yes this is fine. Not much more you can do to really ^^; Hope it was helpful