Best way to cache with SSD

[RoverGuy7]

I have gone through and done some research on this, but nothing I've found really fits my situation.

I just built a new computer for work, and would like to cache my mechanical storage with a small SSD. I have a 840 pro for my OS and programs, and another for VMs. I have a 2tb WD green drive for all my data.

I have a 50gb Mushkin Catalyst that I would like to have cache the data on my WD drive(I have a ton of small files that I access often, and would like to be able to search quickly) The Catalyst came with Dataplex, which seems to work alright for this, however ideally I want to partition the drive to allow for a place to load a ramdisk image to/from(ramdisk is being used solely for browser cache) and Dataplex will only use the entire volume(which doesn't even allow me over provisioning, but that might be built in)

I am open to simply placing these files that I would like cached onto the SSD, and mounting it as a folder, however I would like there to be redundant storage on the mechanical drive, which I haven't found a good way to accomplish.

Any thoughts, or software that might help me get what I'm looking for?

 

[schmuckley]

http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/

 

[RoverGuy7]

Thanks. I went to install this last night, and decided to run AS SSD on the drive first, just to have a baseline of what the cache drive would do.

It was way low, seq at ~160/60 read/write. Didn't have much time to play with it to see what was going on, but I'll report back with how that software works out for me.

 

[WT]

Interested in how this pans out as well ,as I had tried Primo cache before, back when it was known as Fancy cache, but never got around to benchmarks.

 

[RoverGuy7]

So I installed PrimoCache, and I must say, very nice software.

It is working great for my purposes. I disabled the L1 cache, as for me a small ram cache wouldn't help too much, and set up only a L2(on SSD) which was painless, and easily configured.

The software interface is nice for seeing how much has cached, and I still have a good amount of playing around with it left.

 

[Z15CAM]

Best way is to Properly Design your Platform accordingly and Configure your OS Manually - Don't rely on 3rd Party Cashing Apps.

I load a RAMDisk Image and Point all Win & Local User temporary writes and Application Temp Files to say a 2 or 4 GB partition in Ram. That way with every reboot you flush all your Temporary Files and prevent excessive writes to the SSD with each Windows Session and your System is FASTER.

My RAMDisk Partiton would look something like this: Audition Cash - Bridge C6 Cash - NERO Temp - PowerISO Temp - PSP9 Temp - 7-Zip Temp - AnyDVD Temp - Firefox Cash - Local Temp - IE Temporary Internet Files - Windows Temp - Winevt - WinRAR Temp and WinZIP Temp ... etc. In order to preserve Indexing on Partitions I assign I place an INDEXING Directory on a HDD. Disable Hibernation or place it on HDD. I also disable System Restore and use DOS Ghost.exe for OS BackUps.

Place your Pagefile (not back into RAM), Download, My Documents, Saved Games, OutLook Mail ... etc on a HDD (perhaps Raid-0), in other wards keep all your personal files off the SSD.

Never DownLoad or Capture Movies to your SSD, however, you can install and run Games off your SSD where I Partition the SSD into 3. Say for a 256 GB SSD would be: 1 GB FAT32 for Active Boot Partition(1GB to 100MB min - Handy for DOS Apps Flashing or storing Registry BackUps ... etc), 60 GB Win7 NTFS OS Partition and a 177 GB NTFS Game Partition. All the rest goes to a RAID-0 PlayGround HDD Drives and a Single None Raid HDD for OS BackUps & Personal Storage.