Impact of L2 caching using an SDD that boots Windows

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silverbak
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Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2020 12:11 pm

Impact of L2 caching using an SDD that boots Windows

Post by silverbak »

Hello,

I use an M.2 128GB SSD with Windows 10 installed which functions as a primary drive.

I use a secondary 2TB 5400 HDD drive mounted as D:, which I use for installing games to, which are seemingly getting larger and larger each year!

This machine has 32GB of RAM.

I bought Primocache for it's L1 caching capability but have been experimenting with the benefit of setting up a L2 cache. I shrank the partition on the SSD to create a spare 50GB spare parition. On there I set up an L2 cache using that full 50GB.

Reading this forum this doesn't appear to be a common usecase. It seems to me that most people dedicated an SSD to L2 caching an HDD, rather than partitioning an SSD that is used to serve Windows.

What are the performance implications of setting up an L2 cache with this set up compared with providing an SSD dedicated to caching?

Will I still benefit overall from this set up or should I perhaps just have an L1 cache?

Silverbak
Nick7
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Joined: Sun Jun 25, 2017 7:50 am

Re: Impact of L2 caching using an SDD that boots Windows

Post by Nick7 »

Yes, you will still benefit almost the same as when using separate SSD.
Only thing to keep in mind is - PrimoCache will use same resources as your Windows installation. Windows itself doesn't do much I/O when it's up though, so no real issues there.

Btw, my boot SSD is 500GB (Windows+Apps+some games), and I have 128GB set there as L2 cache.
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