Ram cache

[Realityshift]

Hey guys, I just bit the bullet and upgraded to 16gb of ddr3, mostly because I heard rumblings about setting up a ram disk for caching to improve performance and hopefully take some usage off my ssd.

Just wondering if anyone can point me in a solid direction for walk throughs on how to do this? I really only need 4gb of ram, the other 12gb I want to use as a ram disk for my windows cache.

[lowfat]

Personally I think ram drives are a complete waste. And setting one up just to save a few writes on an SSD is kind of pointless. The SSD's controller will die well before the NAND will start to die.

But you could use the ram as a cache for the drives. It will help a lot w/ write performance as well as make writing to the SSD a little easier on the drive since all of the writes will be sequential instead of random. For this you could use FancyCache. For me I have a 4GB read/write cache set for my Crucial M4 boot drive. I also use another 2GB as write cache for a mechanical drive that I use for downloads & SageTV recordings. There is a 3 month trial of the beta if you want to give it a shot. I've had good luck w/ it over the past few months.

What my settings look like for my boot drive cache.

[Realityshift]

Caching for my mechanical drives, which is where my games and most used programs are normally stored, is what im mostly interested in. Im going to take a look at this fancycache, seems right on the money for what im looking at. Thanks lowfat

[Realityshift]

Started a cache for both my os SSD and my games/programs volume on my WD 640 black and Im already noticing a huge difference in program start up times =)