Help with setting up PrimoCache

[Hooch]

Hello.
I have one 120GB (100GB) SSD that I want to use as cache (it is to small for my Winodws installation).
I have 1TB (2x500GB partioions) HDD.

I have C drive with Windows and all programs.
I have D drive with all data. Documents, images, Visual Studio projects, Office files.....

I have only 8GB of RAM.

This is what I have set up. Is it good?
I formatted my SSD and created 2 partitions. Partition 1 is 70GB. Partiton 2 is 30GB.
Lets call them Cache70 and Cache30.

I created 2 cache tasks (for each HDD partition).
Firstly C drive (System and programs):


And D drive (Data):



Is this good setup? What could I improve?
Should I use one cache for both partitions?


P.S.
On data drive there is no "critical" data. All important data is backed up regulary and all my source code is kept on my main SVN and Git servers.

[Stubi]

I just can talk about the L1 Cache since I do not use the L2 cache. I guess that you have a 64 Bit system. The cache settings depend on your system usage. So I would set up a L1 cache and watch the statistics PrimoCache shows. Only based on this you can set the best values for YOUR system. How much you can use from the 8 GB memory depends on your usage too. Many people have a lot of memory in their system but if they have a closer look they will never use much of it.

In respect of partitions - I keep the C partition as small as possible. This has the advantage that a backup and restore of the OS is very quick. So your SSD would be more than big enough for a Windows installation and for a L2 Cache. If you cannot install some software on other partitions than C then check out junctions. The software thinks it is on C even if it is on a different partition because of such junctions that you can set up. You can see them as a redirection from C (or whatever location) to a different drive (location). This redirection is invisible to the installed software. So it still thinks it is on C. You can move folders even after installation with these junctions to a different location.

[Bjameson]

@Hooch:
Watch how much of your L2 space is used after you've run your most often used programs. PrimoCache shows how much L2 is still free. If you have plenty of space left, you could decrease the L2 size to make room for more useful things. Having 2 L2's is fine, although splitting L2's is most useful when each L2 resides on a different physical disk. In your case you could just as well create one large L2 and allocate parts of its space to C: and D:. There is no real need for that so if it works fine now, just leave it.

@Stubi:
I have also done this symbolic link thing. It works flawlessly. I moved my static data (program directories) to another disk and symbolic-linked them back to C:\Program Files. It makes the C: partition smaller so it fits on a small SSD & my backups take less time. I keep one master backup of the redirected disk, which only changes after installing or removing programs. Well give or take a few modified .ini files. A backup once a month is safe enough for me. Instead of making an image backup of the disk holding the redirected disk, I simply copy the compressed container to a backup drive.

-> Have large compilers with zillions of small files that eat up much space, no matter where you put them? I use Visual Studio, RAD Studio and a handful of others. Both are large and stubborn and refuse to install on network drives and sometimes even stumble on symbolic links. Solved by creating a highly compressed Pismo directory, in which I have installed a Gizmo virtual hard drive (which is a file masquerading as a true harddrive). The disk holding the compressed image is cached by PrimoCache. Disk utilities such as Disk Defrag see no difference between a physical drive and the emulated one. This results in a highly compressed emulated harddisk which is accepted by both Visual Studio and RAD Studio, even when I run my compilers in another user space (As Administrator, for debugging core utils).

Slow? Yes, somewhat. But I start my compilers only once a day. 20 GB of compilers stored on a 5 GB compressed drive. Way, way better than NT's native compression. Besides installing programs directly onto the compressed drive, existing directories can also be symbolic-linked to the compressed drive. Use Google to find Pismo and Gizmo, both freeware and fully working on Windows 8.1-X64 and W7-X64. Be sure to draw a map of symlinks and drive mappings, or face agony when things go wrong. For the technically-minded, these sort of things are fun!