Romex Software Forum

I have just recently started using L2 Cache to augment the overall caching routine. Currently I have 2 drives under a single cache being a 4gb Boot Drive (Compact Flash over Sata) and a 320gb storage drive over Sata. The L2 Cache consists of a 4gb Physical Ramdisk with known working ram over the Sata bus.

During testing I have noticed that once the L2 cache fills up to at close to 2gb, I will start getting phantom errors during the windows session. These issues would be 'corrupt' and 'unrecoverable file' errors that would be exposed as a long list upon a chkdsk during testing. If I were to restart, I would then end up with a BSOD of 'process1_intialization_failed' upon startup. The only way to remedy this would be to either disconnect the L2 Cache medium or disable L2 if I can before shutdown which defeats the purpose. Furthermore, if I continue with the session trying to access the parts of the drive now producing fake file errors and then commit the writes to that drive afterward those files and directories will, in fact, become corrupt in actuality. Otherwise if I do not continue and remove the l2 cache and restart, the file system/corruption errors that were otherwise exposed as a generously long list no longer exist and the scan comes up without a single error.

To further add on, if the L2 Cache is around oh.. 1.75gb or so filled and I issue a restart - the next session will instead issue a boatload of memory access errors and 'insufficient memory' allocation errors despite having 6gb+ free. These errors will happen while accessing most applications during the resulting session thereafter.

The issue never occurs long as I keep the L2 cache at around 1gb or so maximum. The OS the L2 Cache is being used on is Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x86. So my question is if this is a known issue under a 32bit system? Is it because L2 handles itself as a separate form of memory allocation addressing and thus pushing memory boundaries under a 32-bit system?

Full system specs can be found in the following text file: http://rwinds.no-ip.org/~archive/SpecList_Scarab.txt

While separating the drives into their own cache task and partitioning the L2 storage medium I came upon another oddity while formatting them for use as L2. ALl 3 partitioned just fine with their own respective drive letters prior.

1st partition was made successfully of 1526mb, L2Formatted, and assigned to the boot drive.
2nd partition was made successfully of 1526mb, L2Formatted... and unusable...
3rd Partition was made successfully of 1012mb, L2Formatted, and can be assigned to the storage drive.

While formatting them for L2 use it showed up as this instead... EDITED:
Well, working fine now with a full 3gb L2 thus far and will update accordingly. Seems that formatting oddity pointed me to the source of the issues. Seems I'll be making a return shortly of this RamDrive as even though the ram in DIMM slot 1 was being detected the slot itself is bad. This correlates with the L2Format strangeness when the partition being formatted began anywhere within the 1024~2048mb range. It seems that as long as the start of it is fine primocache will still happily use that malfunctioning area. The slot was narrowed down by removing DIMM0 and having DIMM1 as the start of the Ramdisk. Needless so say it would end up with 2 partitions on an uninitialized drive ... showing a fault right there. Everything else is fine however after removal of ram from the bad slot.

PrimoCache and almost every other program in existence expect to find a faultless drive, or at least a drive that can automatically remap bad sectors. Most modern drives can do this. That's why Windows presents two formatting options: one with, and one without a surface test. The 'Quick Format' option (without surface test) is even selected by default.

You could use HDTune or a similar disk test program. Destructively erase/wipe the entire drive and any bad SIMMs or bad slots will show up as disk sector read errors. Also, Windows Chkdsk with the "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" option checked should have found the problem.

By the way, I've been looking for such a RAM disk for a long time but they're difficult to find. It should be at least 32 GB. Do you happen to know a reseller that ships to W-Europe (Netherlands)? Thanks!