caching... only smarter

[CosminNet]

been using superspeed supercache several months and got corrupted files and a os reinstall so this is how i found fancycache
been trying to make the visual studio build experience smoother and tried several solutions. after some time it became clear that the bottlenck was the large number of small writes on the hdd. the reads are taken care quite well on windows 7 expecially if you have enough ram. when i saw that fancy cache can do write-only caching i was so happy and thought this would be the holy grail. let me describe my setup:
- win 7 x64 + 8gb ram
- 60gig ssd with indilix (gen1) for os and apps, does good job with startup times, not so great on small writes
- 500gig hdd used for projects, lots of small files
using r/w caching, 500-1000megs of ram for L1, 2gb of L2 on ssd. this seems to actually work pretty well but i think it can be made better. windows 7 is ok with read caching. writes on the other hand are handled more conservatively and you get bottlenecked on writes. what if there would be possible to use r/w caching, L1 cache mostly write, and L2 being mostly read. one could have a setup with 8gigs of ram, use some ram (several hundreds of megs of ram to several gigs, depending on the amount of ram and usage model) for L1 (write-only) and dedicate part or an entire small ssd to L2.

my proposal:
- let windows do it's read caching as much as possible as it does it quite good and i do not think it can be much improved
- L1 should be in 500-2000gig or more, but it would be mostly used as write cache as here you will get the biggest benefit. this cache should resize and give back the ram to os. it will also be quite active.
- L2 should be on a ssd and have bias towards reads, acting as a windows cache extension for files that do not fit in ram. this will be slower to change but it will compensate this through size.
ps1: if L1 is mostly-write cache then you do not have to worry that data gets duplicated both in L1 and win cache
ps2: L2 beeing potentially a lot larger than ram, you do nothave to worry (or it does nto matter too much) if the data gets duplicated between windows cache and L2. my main concern would be to minimise writes on this cache as it will most likely reside on nand
ps3: make the L2 cache persistent and you got a winner

[Support]

Hi CosminNet,

Thank you very much for sharing your experience!