Best way to set up Primo on my system?

[mrtonaka]

Hello everybody! I'm new to the forum, and also new to PrimoCache itself, please bare with my lack of knowledge. I'm running a Lenovo Y520 laptop with the following config:

CPU: Intel i7 7700HQ
RAM: 32GB DDR4 2666Mhz
GPU: Geforce 1060 + Intel HD 630
Drive1: Samsung PM961 512GB NVMe SSD
Drive2: Seagate 1TB 5400rpm HDD

My Windows 10 is on the primary SSD, in addition I have some games, office stuff and Adobe software (Photoshop, Premiere Pro) installed there. On my secondary drive (slow laptop HDD) I also have some games installed, plus movies, music, and torrent software seeding from there. In short: I use both drives for everything pretty much. I'm ready to use 8GB of my 32gigs of RAM for caching both drives, plus I could shrink my C drive by 20-40gigs for using as a L2 cache on the slow HDD if it helped. What I'd like to achieve is a safe and stable way of speeding up my system (I use this laptop for school and work too) with PrimoCache, but not really sure what is the best way to do it in my use scenario. Would it really help to use both RAM and my SSD as cache for the HDD or would making 4-4Gb L1 cache for both drive suffice my needs? I'd really appreciate if somebody patient and knowledgeable enough would help me with a step by step guide. I do use sleep mode on my laptop, and as it's a mobile device I'd like to keep my power saving options enabled. I also wouldn't mind if the setup helped with the games loading time on the slow HDD.
Also I'd like to ask, does using PrimoCache come with a degradation of CPU performance (does it use the CPU much?)? I have some games where I'm already pretty CPU-limited.
Sorry for the wall of text and thanks in advance guys!

[Support]

You may try the following cache configuration.
L1: 8GB, shared read/write
L2: 40GB, 100% read,
block size: 4KB. If you see too much memory overhead, increase block size.
Defer-Write: disabled
Prefetch: enabled.

[mrtonaka]

Appreciate your help, I replied to your email with a few more questions regarding my setup.

[Jaga]

To add to what Support indicated: I'd bump up the L1 size to 12GB, or 16GB if you don't run really memory-hungry apps/games. You can adjust the L1 size on the fly, but it will dump L1 cache contents each time you do it, so try one size for a while and see how it goes, then adjust and try again for a while (1-2 days is usually enough if you're actively using software to try a configuration).

[mrtonaka]

Thanks for the suggestion Jaga. The only reason why I'm hesitant of using more than 8, is because I ocasionally have to edit and render 4k videos in premiere, and that can be really ram hungry. I will test and check though!