Question Is PrimoCache worth it?

[Hi-Fi Man]

Doesn't this default your board primary gpu slot to 8x then and not 16x?

I assume thats the only way your going to get enough pci-e lanes with the addition of a nvme.

My board has a 4x PCIe slot that the HBA is connected to. 4x of PCIe 2.0 is 20 GT/s which is plenty for 2 SATA drives and an optical drive.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Using something like PrimoCache is a complication if you -- say -- have problems coming out of sleep or hibernate and need to troubleshoot things like RAM. The symptoms I had last week could easily have resulted from the video card's own overclock settings, and I can run it at stock just to see if that was the cause of my Event ID 41. I had to repair my main NVME boot drive, with action taken pertaining to a handful of security descriptors.

But so far, I'm back in business after clearing the caches and the default video card setting. Not sure yet what it was -- it only happened once.

 

[0ldman79]

I upgraded my L2 cache to a Samsung 256GB NVME and my WD Black 2TB (previously thought it was a Red) failed so now I've got a temp 2TB WD USB 5400RPM drive.

Without Primocache Cyberpunk 2077 loads a save game in 48 seconds. With Primocache it loads in 18 seconds.

Definitely worth it.

 

[0ldman79]

Using something like PrimoCache is a complication if you -- say -- have problems coming out of sleep or hibernate and need to troubleshoot things like RAM. The symptoms I had last week could easily have resulted from the video card's own overclock settings, and I can run it at stock just to see if that was the cause of my Event ID 41. I had to repair my main NVME boot drive, with action taken pertaining to a handful of security descriptors.

But so far, I'm back in business after clearing the caches and the default video card setting. Not sure yet what it was -- it only happened once.

I've had it corrupt my game drive once.
Game hung up and on reboot the drive was unreadable, checkdisk found hundreds of corrupted folders and hundreds of thousands of files. I managed to restore *almost* everything. I copied the game installs from my laptop to the desktop on the ones that were corrupted and used Steam to clean up a couple of Arkham series file errors.

That's only happened once and I think they've improved their system a bit since then. I was probably running v2.6 when that happened.

 

[Charlie22911]

So I’ve been running it on 3 of my machines now. Two of them have a single 6TB HDD caching to a partition on NVME SSD, and the other has 4x 10 year old 2TB 7.2K rpm HDDs in RAID0 caching to a NVME partition.

My experience and opinion up to this point hasn’t changed. First launch of games is about what you’d expect, and the RAID disks aren’t really much faster than the single 6TB WD black, which is amusing.
Subsequent launches *feel* like an SSD though, and this is maintained as long as you aren’t loading a level or part of a world for the first time. I also have write caching to RAM enabled on my 64GB machines, and the big steam updates are noticeably better.

I’m a niche user though, my steam library alone at this point is approaching 5TB and that’s not that crazy as I’ve seen WAY bigger. As a matter of convenience, I keep all games installed. It’s just not economical to use an SSD, and I can’t be bothered to move the better part of 100GB over to the SSD when I get sucked into a game I haven’t played in a while.
I have a VM spun up on my unRAID server that keeps a local copy of my steam library updated, as well as snapshots of my machines; if my RAID or Primocache take a dump it’s a minor inconvenience at worst.
This is pretty close to the ideal use case I think. SSDs are so cheap these days that I can see this type of software eventually becoming irrelevant, but for now it is very useful and provides meaningful benefits in specific scenarios. They have a trial period for a reason, so give it a try before bashing it.

 

[msroadkill612]

I've had it corrupt my game drive once.
Game hung up and on reboot the drive was unreadable, checkdisk found hundreds of corrupted folders and hundreds of thousands of files. I managed to restore *almost* everything. I copied the game installs from my laptop to the desktop on the ones that were corrupted and used Steam to clean up a couple of Arkham series file errors.

That's only happened once and I think they've improved their system a bit since then. I was probably running v2.6 when that happened.

Most cant let go of the "" space is precious more" - so they dangerously split files between the 2 drives.

the point is speed tho - so opt to simply mirror popular files on the fast drive - there is no added risk. if the fast drive failes, the original files on the big slow drive remain intact.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I've had it corrupt my game drive once.
Game hung up and on reboot the drive was unreadable, checkdisk found hundreds of corrupted folders and hundreds of thousands of files. I managed to restore *almost* everything. I copied the game installs from my laptop to the desktop on the ones that were corrupted and used Steam to clean up a couple of Arkham series file errors.

That's only happened once and I think they've improved their system a bit since then. I was probably running v2.6 when that happened.

Uh, yeah -- that's an early version. It could be a matter of practice as opposed to causation by the software exclusively. Certainly, the write-caching feature poses a risk. That's the warning that comes directly from Romex.

As I've blabbed in other threads, I just purchased my first and only new laptop, second of two I now own. The old one should be headed for the bone-yard. I think it needs a CMOS battery replacement, and although I have an unused spare, it's a laptop version of C2D, can only have a maximum of 8GB RAM, and -- it's just slow. It was released in the market during 2007. The new one is an LG gram 17, with 32GB of RAM. So I'm planning to give it a Romex license and do some caching with the spare RAM. It has a 1TB boot drive, and it's an NVME.

 

[0ldman79]

BonzaiDuck

For some reason the caching of the data drive just hosed the entire MFT. I mean 99% of the files and folders on the drive were just gone at a glance, of course they were all still there, some corrupted, real pain to recover. Most would have just reinstalled everything. Had I not had 200GB of Fallout 4 mods I probably would have. I almost certainly had deferred writes enabled but I can't see how that would corrupt the ENTIRE drive. Had to be an odd set of circumstances to frag the entire drive. It wasn't even reading Fallout 4 from the drive in question, I moved Fallout 4 to my C drive before I had the caching system situated properly, never moved it back to the spinner.


msroadkill612

This is using the supposed "safe" feature. Deferred writes should have lost whatever data was being written to the drive at the time, not everything. I mean when I was playing Fallout 4 (which is what crashed) it was on my C drive, WD Blue 1TB SSD, the 2TB game drive only held a few mod files from Fallout 4 and Nexus Mod Manager. It should have resulted in losing savegame data on my C drive, not virtually the entire contents of my game drive, which was practically idle at the time.

I still recommend this program and I've not had an issue since but damn...

 

[Tiitu]

Hello,

I did run ChrystalDiskMark 8 (https://crystalmark.info/en/software/crystaldiskmark/) speed test for PrimoCache and here are my conclusions:

1. My PC's internal SSD got 4 times faster while reading and 20 times faster while writing.

2. With an external Samsung T7 the same numbers were 25 and 50.

3. The boost for a mechanical hard disk would be many times more!

 

[Furious_Styles]

So I’ve been running it on 3 of my machines now. Two of them have a single 6TB HDD caching to a partition on NVME SSD, and the other has 4x 10 year old 2TB 7.2K rpm HDDs in RAID0 caching to a NVME partition.

My experience and opinion up to this point hasn’t changed. First launch of games is about what you’d expect, and the RAID disks aren’t really much faster than the single 6TB WD black, which is amusing.
Subsequent launches *feel* like an SSD though, and this is maintained as long as you aren’t loading a level or part of a world for the first time. I also have write caching to RAM enabled on my 64GB machines, and the big steam updates are noticeably better.

I’m a niche user though, my steam library alone at this point is approaching 5TB and that’s not that crazy as I’ve seen WAY bigger. As a matter of convenience, I keep all games installed. It’s just not economical to use an SSD, and I can’t be bothered to move the better part of 100GB over to the SSD when I get sucked into a game I haven’t played in a while.
I have a VM spun up on my unRAID server that keeps a local copy of my steam library updated, as well as snapshots of my machines; if my RAID or Primocache take a dump it’s a minor inconvenience at worst.
This is pretty close to the ideal use case I think. SSDs are so cheap these days that I can see this type of software eventually becoming irrelevant, but for now it is very useful and provides meaningful benefits in specific scenarios. They have a trial period for a reason, so give it a try before bashing it.

5 TB? Good lord man time to uninstall those games you beat/haven't played for over a year.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I can just say this about it.

I"ve been building my own desktops since 1994. With a lot more income then when I was working, I'd budget my builds and pinch pennies. I never overclocked until around 2005. Even after that, I was recycling old junk OEM cases. I became keen on using better parts where it counted, for instance power supplies. Storage was another thing: I never wanted a workstation that was over-provisioned drawing more power.

Then, after we graduated to SATA SSDs and then again the NVME drives, there was always a place for some spinners. And I started using 2.5" spinners instead of the heavier 3.5" ones. So when I built my most recent system, I'd already experimented with PrimoCache so that parts purchases and their intentions had PRimCache in mind. Right away, I used a 250GB NVME for L2 cache. I chose 32GB of RAM so I could avail of the L1 feature. I have a 2TB SATA SSD, and two 2TB spinners -- one of them for Macrium backup.

Never had any drive errors, no signs of storage components "going south", none of that. This system doesn't have Optane. Some folks at the PrimoCache (Romex) forum have experimented with Optane PCs and Primo, and for my quick scan of the thread, nothing wrong there, either.