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solitude45
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Partition C:\drive - setup configuration

Post by solitude45 »

Can this configuration work:

1) I plan on buying a 1 TB Samsung 980 Pro, and partition 500 GB for the C:\drive and 500 GB for a D:\drive. I’d like the D:\drive to be L2 cache for 3 HHDs (12, 16 & 18 TB drives).

2) I have a 58 GB Intel Optane p1600x that I’d like to use as L2 cache for the C:\drive. I believe it's fast enough to be a benefit as L2 cache.

Is this configuration okay?

Should I get a 2 TB Samsung Pro due to the 3 large HHDs (1.5 TB L2 cache), or is the 500 GB L2 cache big enough (just need the cache for movies, music, and documents)?

I also have 64 GB of RAM. Any suggestion on the best way to use most of it for L1 cache? (Only for the C:\drive, only for the HDDs, or a mix of both?)

Thank you for your time and assistance!
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Re: Partition C:\drive - setup configuration

Post by Support »

solitude45 wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 3:31 am I have a 58 GB Intel Optane p1600x that I’d like to use as L2 cache for the C:\drive. I believe it's fast enough to be a benefit as L2 cache.
Because C drive is in the Samsung 980 Pro which is quite fast, you might not need the L2 cache for the C drive. It's better that L2 drive is 2x faster than the target drive.
solitude45 wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 3:31 am Should I get a 2 TB Samsung Pro due to the 3 large HHDs (1.5 TB L2 cache), or is the 500 GB L2 cache big enough (just need the cache for movies, music, and documents)?
Capacity of HDDs is too large, I'm afraid that even 1.5TB cache will not help much for improving read performance. Usually, read cache space should be 20% or more of target drives. Of course, the performance also depends on how much data are frequently accessed in HDDs. That is, if most data is cold data, small cache also can get good read performance.

L1 and L2 cache can be used for defer-write to improve write performance if you have a write bottleneck issue. A relative small write cache can also get good write performance.

For more information, please see
https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/pri ... cache.html
https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/pri ... write.html
solitude45
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Re: Partition C:\drive - setup configuration

Post by solitude45 »

Thank you for responding.

My main question is, can I buy the new SSD (Samsung 980 Pro) and partition off a portion of it, so part of the new drive is the C:\drive with the OS, and the other portion is L2 cache for the HDDs?

Is this configuration good, or does this cause any conflicts (sharing the OS drive with the L2 cache drive for the HDDs)?

Yes, the drives I want to use L2 cache for are very large, and I understand the 20% target. However, I don't regularly access a lot of data on those drives to where I care to cache 20% of each drive. There are just a various-number of files I want to cache across those 3 large drives. Right now, my Cache Hit Rate is only 0.45% on the main drive I want cached, which is surprising to me. I'm assuming that's because I have a large amount (32768 MB) of L1 cache. I've attached images of my current configuration.

Thank you again, I appreciate it.

(Ignore the E and F drives. They are included in the "pool" of data, but I don't care if anything is cached from them.)
Attachments
PC1.JPG
PC1.JPG (206.2 KiB) Viewed 550 times
PC2.JPG
PC2.JPG (66.56 KiB) Viewed 550 times
PC3.JPG
PC3.JPG (69.91 KiB) Viewed 550 times
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Re: Partition C:\drive - setup configuration

Post by Support »

solitude45 wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 8:38 pm My main question is, can I buy the new SSD (Samsung 980 Pro) and partition off a portion of it, so part of the new drive is the C:\drive with the OS, and the other portion is L2 cache for the HDDs?
Yes, you can.
solitude45 wrote: Tue Sep 13, 2022 8:38 pm (Ignore the E and F drives. They are included in the "pool" of data, but I don't care if anything is cached from them.)
Remove these unimportant drives from the cache task, as they may consume lots of memory to maintain cache information, especially when the drive capacity is large. Also access on these drives will cause PrimoCache to cache data for them. When cache space is full, this will trigger cache replacement and might discard other drives' cached data.
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Re: Partition C:\drive - setup configuration

Post by Support »

And it's better to use separate read and write cache space for the L2 cache, so that writes don't affect the read cache. For more information, please see
https://kb.romexsoftware.com/en-us/2-pr ... ache-space

Another thing is that you may enable the option "Flush L1 cache to L2 cache" in the advanced defer-write options when you have both L1 and L2 for defer-write.
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Re: Partition C:\drive - setup configuration

Post by solitude45 »

Thank you!
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