Win 7 cached main memory

[Perryg114]

I was wondering if anyone knows how windows 7 allocates available RAM. If you go to task manager and then performance there is a certain amount of memory that is cached. Is there anyway to increase this value so windows writes to the system memory first and then writes the hard drive when the disk has time to catch up? It seems like most of the memory is never used even with 64 bit Win 7.

Perry

 

[theevilsharpie]

The windows system cache is used for various functions. As far as a file system goes, short answer: Windows stores a file in cache when it's read from disk.

The type of cache you're thinking of is a disk write cache. If you want to cache disk writes into memory, open Device Manager, go to your hard drive, and adjust the cache properties under the policy tab. Keep in mind that disk write caching is not safe if you don't have some type of battery backup.

 

[Nothinman]

I was wondering if anyone knows how windows 7 allocates available RAM. If you go to task manager and then performance there is a certain amount of memory that is cached. Is there anyway to increase this value so windows writes to the system memory first and then writes the hard drive when the disk has time to catch up? It seems like most of the memory is never used even with 64 bit Win 7.

Perry

It should already be doing that, but it only lets dirty pages sit for so long before it flushes them to avoid dataloss in the event of power loss or a STOP error.

theevilsharpie mentions how to change that behavior per-disk, but caching should already be enabled for non-removable disks.