Romex Software Forum

Hi.

I've been using primocache since it was fancycache and I loved so much this program that I just bought it the moment I knew it was available to purchase.

By now, Im using it on a laptop and recently I have my mobo from my desktop PC going to RMA... so I thought "why not use my SSD as L2 cache in the meantime ?"

So, Im using my SSD with an USB adapter so I can use it as L2 persistent cache for playing a couple of games (it really helps!)

But here is the problem, if I start the laptop without the enclosure turned on, it wont recognize my SSD to do the L2 caching unless I create a new caching task and that new task requires me to "format" the data in the partition that has the L2 cache, so all the data is lost doing that.

So, it could be a nice feature if I dont lose the L2 data when using an USB device as L2 cache.

Thanks in advance.

TylerCiggy wrote:So, it could be a nice feature if I dont lose the L2 data when using an USB device as L2 cache.

The big problem is that feature would greatly increase the chance of data corruption since the contents of your hard disk will have changed since the cache was last updated (in particular, system-critical files like the registry will have been changed during Windows startup along with the MFT, pre-fetch files, logfiles, etc).

The only way to avoid this is for PrimoCache to compare the contents of L2 with the hard disk on startup and update the cache if any data on disk is more recent - in practice that is likely to take as long (if not longer) to do than rebuilding the cache from scratch, since PrimoCache works at block level while last-modified info is stored at file level (so for each block, PrimoCache would have to look up the corresponding filename, check its last-modified date and re-read that block if more recent).

We do have some improvements and fixes for USB level-2 cache storage in v2.0.0. Perhaps you may try this new version.

You may plug in USB SSD later after laptop starts. However, if SSD is not plugged-in during the entire Windows run, L2 data will be discarded to avoid the "out of sync" issue as InquiringMind said.