Romex Software Forum

Hello everyone!

I've been using PrimoCache for some 3 months now, and I seem to be missing something because the cache task is nto working propoerly - especially the read cache.

My PC setup is the following:

My boot drive is a NVMe SSD not being targeted by PrimoCache (Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500 GB).
I also have a 1 TB HDD (containing game installations and some software cache like Adobe Lightroom catalogs) that I'm trying to accelerate with PrimoCache. In order to do that I'm using a 256 GB SATA SSD (Samsung 850 Pro) as L2 cache. I read a lot of stuff here at this forum, at the main site's FAQ and knowledge base, but I must be missing something. All configurations of PrimoCache I've tried so far have had very similar issues for me.

Currently I'm using the preset configuration "Accelerate Read & Write". It created a RAM disk for L1 cache (I have 32 GB of ram, so that's fine for me) and set my L2 SATA SSD as L2 read-only cache for my HDD. The problem that happens is that as days go by, the L2 storage starts to be filled (which seems desirable, as I imagine it's being filled by tha data that needs to be in cache for read acceleration. But a few days/reboots later my L2 storage gets all freed up again, as if the data was deleted from there. Then when I try to load data from my HDD (say, run a game or edit my photo catalog on Adobe Lightroom) the task gets very slow, probably because of HDD speeds not being properly accelerated by cache on SSD. The Cache read rate graph in PrimoCache hardly gets above 60%, and usually is very low because my SSD cache gets being emptied. 3 months or so using PrimoCache and I've never seen my L2 cache have less than 200 GB of free space.

Can anybody help me? What am I doing wrong? I'll put some screenshots here for you to see.

Some more screenshots

Nothing looks wrong with the configuration to me. I might turn on "Start at Windows Boot" for the Prefetch options, but other than that nothing seems amiss.

The cache will clear if it thinks it had an unsafe shutdown, or if changes occur to the drive when Primocache wasn't loaded (like an offline CHKDSK that makes volume adjustments). Do you recall if you've had any bad shutdowns or warnings from Windows that shutdown didn't occur properly?

One thing I personally do is to flush any deferred writes to the drive(s) just before I shutdown or restart the machine. It's not required, but I think it is a good safety measure to ensure nothing gets missed and left in RAM by accident.

I can't recall any apparent shutdown problem occurring... Even less so frequent shutdown errors that would be making this happen so often.

For the L2 content clear issue, please check followings.
1) There was no ungraceful shutdown.
2) You didn't install a cracked version/patch of PrimoCache or Primo Ramdisk before. The crack version may have something remaining in your computer and cause this issue even you have uninstalled it.
3) No write-protect on the C drive (system partition) or the Windows registry.
4) Level-2 storage drive is not in Windows Stroage Pool.
5) Turn off Windows Fast Startup if above doesn't work.

I'll check, thanks. I used the trial period of PrimoCache and then bought the license, so no cracked version was installed.

It would be nice if PrimoCache had a log so one could check how the software and caching is working.

OK, so I took a look at my SSD configurations and I may have found the culprit for my problem.
The SSD I'm using for L2 cache is a Samsung 850 Pro SATA drive. And as my system drive is also a Samsung SSD (970 EVO Pro, a M.2 PCIe drive), I use the Samsung Magician software to monitor both drives' health and tweak some settings. I had RAPID Mode activated for my SATA drive (it's not supported on PCIe drives), so maybe this function was messing with PrimoCache regular functioning.

I'll take some time now with RAPID Mode deactivated to see if the problem persists or not.

All the Windows configs you guys told me to check seem fine here.

Definitely turn off RAPID. And Magician isn't really needed 24/7, just allow it to start with Windows and then terminate it yourself (I do this with similar drive monitoring software). Or leave it off (no loading at boot time) and run it once a week manually. Samsung drives are usually solid once they get past the first week to month of their lifespan.