ram cache for hdds and ssds

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i'm using fancy cache to make my ssd and hdd faster by caching into ram as i got a 32gb ram system
and i'm already noticed a prominence increase
disk io with cache: around 5GB/S up for 267MB/S

what do you think of ram caching

Caching disk writes to volatile memory is asking for trouble. If you don't understand why, you shouldn't be doing it.

If you really care about a disk cache - get a RAID card with memory cache and make sure you use the BBU.

fancycache is know for being stable and it does seed things up.
i can make a more redardent by using the flash drive back up it has

Constant cycling of a flash drive can wear it out.. believe it or not non-volatile memory has limitations.

I remember trying to run a video recoding program off a usb stick constantly.. killed it in a week.

I don't do flash fail safe myself
I just have my disks cached in to my ram like this
2gb cache for ssd
2gb cache for hdd

Making an explicit cache in RAM is a bit redundant.
It's like saying I'm going to section off a chunk of RAM to store this data in, instead of storing it in this chunk of RAM.

Just turn off paging for the drives in question.

And what do you think happens when your machine loses power?

i have no page file on my computer it was the first thing i disabled

Exactly. Not worth the risk of total crash. At very least, I'd use a UPS to save the machine in an outage!

For an older machine that can't use Intel's SRT caching (using 64GB of SSD to cache a hard drive - no point of caching a SSD!) I'd consider one of those Seagate Hybrid drives... the old gen was the Momentus XT but they just released a new SSHD lineup yesterday.

It's not "ultimate", but a big jump up for the average joe like me.

That said, I just downloaded fancycache for my laptop. It might even spare some battery life by not accessing the HDD, plus it's smart enough to use the RAM not addressable in a 32-bit OS. I can have 6GB in this XP lappy (it's new, XP is by choice) and use 3GB as cache, 3GB as OS. Let's try.

Last edited by BlueMax on 07 Mar 2013, 1:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I don't know about other OSs, but Linux automatically caches frequently used files in RAM.

Keeping data in RAM that is supposed to be saved on disk? Bad idea.

Disk speed is only really relevant on start-up, and caching won't help you there, as the cache must be filled first.