New PrimoCache User, setting up read-only SSD cache settings confusion Topic is solved

[Skyy]

Hi everyone here

A few days ago I completely by accident discovered PrimoCache and looking at some YouTube comparisons for games I was convinced to try it since I have a unused 120gb SanDisk Ultra II in my system. However I have some trouble understanding if I set it up all correctly so I'm asking for help and confirmation I do everything correctly.

First of all, here's my system-layout:

- 1x 512gb OS/Program SSD
- 2x 2TB game HDDs
- 1x Unused 120gb SSD
- 16GB RAM

My system is super snappy and responsive as it is so I don't want to achieve a general speed-up of my system, all I want to do is to have a safe, read-only cache speed-up of my game HDDs.

I set up the 120gb SSD as a L2 Cache Storage and then created a new Cache task with the following settings:

-Checking only my two game-partitions for caching
- Set Level-1 Cache OS Managed Memory to 0mb
- Set Level-2 Cache to my cache-SSD with MAX size
- Block-Size is set to 128kb
- Under Volume Specifications I unticked everything but Level-2 cache for my game HDDs

Did I set up things correctly? I am unsure if I should have left Prefetch checked in the Volume Specifications and if 128kb is a good sector-size. I recall that SSDs need a specific size to perform best in the partition-layout.

Also I can close the PrimoCache window once everything is setup right? I'm wondering because there's no indication the software is still running.

Thanks for any help in advance!

EDIT: I just did a quick test launching Rocket League twice and I'm not sure it's working:

[Support]

Yes, the setting is correct. You don't need the prefetch option checked because Prefetch is for L1 only.
You can close the PrimoCache window after you set up the cache task. The cache task will keep running even you restart the computer.
When data in your target volumes are read, PrimoCache will cache them into L2 storage. The statistics "L2Storage Write" indicates how much data has been written to L2 cache since you boot up the computer. "L2Storage Read" indicates how much data read from L2 cache. You may play your favorite games a while to let PrimoCache populate L2 cache. To check the performance of L2 cache, you may then restart the computer and play games again.

[Skyy]

Alright thank you very much! Yeah I noticed I misread some statistics yesterday and now got a better understanding of it. I guess I'll keep using it for the month and see how much improvement I notice. Two more things though, is 128kb fine for the block-size? The HDDs are formatted with 4kb clusters. And the cache will be persistent after rebooting too right? I have Windows 10 Fast Boot on.

[Support]

is 128kb fine for the block-size?

It's fine. Because your target volumes are quite large, using small block size will cause much memory overhead (additional memory used to maintain a cache task).

And the cache will be persistent after rebooting too right? I have Windows 10 Fast Boot on.

Right. However, please note that on some computers, sometimes Windows is not able to boot from its save states and it will ungracefully shutdown internally and then reboot from a new state. This ungracefully shutdown will cause PrimoCache resetting its L2 cache content. So if you see sometimes L2 cache get cleared after the boot, you may try turning off the Fast Boot. You can do it directly in the PrimoCache option dialog.

[Skyy]

is 128kb fine for the block-size?

It's fine. Because your target volumes are quite large, using small block size will cause much memory overhead (additional memory used to maintain a cache task).

And the cache will be persistent after rebooting too right? I have Windows 10 Fast Boot on.

Right. However, please note that on some computers, sometimes Windows is not able to boot from its save states and it will ungracefully shutdown internally and then reboot from a new state. This ungracefully shutdown will cause PrimoCache resetting its L2 cache content. So if you see sometimes L2 cache get cleared after the boot, you may try turning off the Fast Boot. You can do it directly in the PrimoCache option dialog.

Alright thanks for clearing that up! Yeah I had some rare ungraceful resets but it rarely happens, maybe 1-2 times a month and I usually notice it when I see the boot-animation dots because when Fast Boot works correctly I usually almost instantaneously see the login-screen and not even my BIOS logo because my monitor takes a moment to get going. But if that starts to happen more often I will turn Fast Boot off, it's not like the 5-10 seconds affrect much