Romex Software Forum

Hello everyone.

So after doing ALOT of research on software SSD caching ( i thought SSHD was the only technology available haha ) i have found that PrimoCache and VeloSSD seem to be the most available software solutions for what im trying to do.
( basically save money, i cant afford much at the moment, i have 50$ to upgrade my laptop )

Okay so, i have an Inspiron 15 5576 AMD Gaming laptop, i know its dell. but hey it was the most available one in my budget at the time! anyway it has 8GB of ram, and a 1TB HDD and an M.2 NVMe Slot in which i plan to buy a 60GB or 128GB of ebay M.2 SSD Drive.

I want to improve the performance generally of my HDD, 90% of what i do is watch movies, web browse, play league of legends , black desert online and other little RTS games, i use my xbox one x for the big games.

So my question is, would Primo cache be a viable option to improve the performance of the HDD by using my SSD as a caching device, would i see any improvements, and my biggest concern is ram, ive heard you have to use ram for the L1 Cache option, but ive seen some videos of people setting that to 0 and just using the SSD as a read-only cache option.

Help would be appreciated

Welcome to the forum!

Yes, PrimoCache can exactly meet your requirement by using a SSD cache for the HDD.

PrimoCache supports RAM (level-1) cache, SSD (level-2) cache, or both. It's flexible and you can just use SSD cache by setting RAM cache size to 0.

support wrote:Welcome to the forum!

Yes, PrimoCache can exactly meet your requirement by using a SSD cache for the HDD.

PrimoCache supports RAM (level-1) cache, SSD (level-2) cache, or both. It's flexible and you can just use SSD cache by setting RAM cache size to 0.

Thanks for the response, but would i see any benefits this way but only using the L2 cache, or is it suggested to use both, 8GB of ram isnt much and i really dont want to use to much of it

nankura wrote: would i see any benefits this way but only using the L2 cache

Yes!

support wrote:

nankura wrote: would i see any benefits this way but only using the L2 cache

Yes!

Sorry to ask another question, funnily enough im very new to this sort of technology, even though i work as a technician.

I just wanted to a little information on how L2 works, i saw the option "Read only SSD Caching" does this affect your read and write speeds on the HDD via SSD caching, because im after increasing both speeds so when i lets say did a benchmark, both read and writes would be significantly higher.

Basically, i dont mind using a tiny bit of RAM for L1, ive heard of some people as little as 512KB, i was just wondering if using L2 by itself is the best way to go to avoid to much RAM usage, or to do a mix of using the full SSD for L2 with the read only ( SSD Cache only ) option and a tiny bit of RAM for L1 , or if doing that wont make much difference to performance.

Or do you have to mix L2 and L1 caching to achieve read/write speed improvements

Here are some articles for your reference.

About L2 cache. (Note: this article is for 2.x versions only and hasn't been updated for v3.x which also supports SSD write caching)
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/prim ... cache.html
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/prim ... -time.html

Recent test results on L2 cache (no L1 cache). Though we used optane drives as level-2 cache for testing, the principle is same for any other drives.
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=4531
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=4532

Hope these help.

It's a forum to find so much.