Romex Software Forum

Hi guys,

I've been watching the evolution of FancyCache for some time and finally decided to register in order to ask for some advice. By the way, I can't wait for you guys to release FancyCache so I can buy it!

I'm currently using it on my old desktop PC (7200 rpm 256 GB HDD (from WesternDigital) with 3 GB of DDR2 800MHz RAM and AMD Athlon 3800+) to great effect (with 512 MB dedicated to caching on my Windows volume and 128 MB for Level 2 on my D drive) - getting 85% read hits.

I recently bought a performance laptop, and I would like to activate FancyCahce on it to optimize performance. Laptop model is Lenovo Y580. I did some modifications to the hardware, and now my laptop has:

- i7 3610QM processor
- 16 GB DDR3 1600 MHz (Corsair Value Edition)
- AData SP900 Premier Pro 128GB SSD (I have my OS (Windows 8 Pro 64bit) and programs installed here, with Prefetch, Superfetch and Defragmenting disabled)
- USB 3 External HDD (Seagate Momentus 1TB 5400 RPM - the original HDD the laptop came with, I just put it in an USB 3 enclosure)

I would like to configure FancyCache to preseve the life of my SSD and cache as much of the reads and writes from my OS files to my memory (SSD = DRIVE C, no partitions, so I'll be using Disk Edition). I'd also like to cache my External HDD if possible, since I'll be using it for games and such.

What settings would you guys recommend? Please mention Block Size too. I can spare a maximum of 8 GB for caching, as most of my programs use 4-8 GB for themselves.

Thanks!

Congrats on your new laptop it looks like a beast.. First off don't worry about preserving your SSD life, that is no longer necessary with the current generation of SSDs. However I am a little wary about using the Momentus with fancycache, as the Momentus has a SSD caching solution built in. Theoretically it shouldn't be an issue but I wouldn't be surprised to see errors pop up.

You can use fancycache with external drives to great effect but you'll lose a lot of the benefit when you shutdown the machine as caches aren't persistent (this goes for all drives of course).

As for advice on what settings to use, that is such a broad question no one can really answer it for you.
Here is the best advice I can give.
1) Give Fancycache as much ram as you can afford to spare, the more RAM cache it has the better it will perform (over time).
2) Write defer might speed up HDD writes but it puts your data at risk. The larger the defer the more you put your data at risk. Don't use this with anything that can not be replaced.
3) TEST TEST TEST. Make a configuration and test it using disk benchmarking tools, I use ATTO, IOMeter & Anvil. These are approximations but it will help you visualize what your configuration changes do to performance.

There is some good info on the forums about testing..