I found this topic (https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/eboostr-for-hdd-cache.293608/) on eBoostr which was left unanswered, and it is probably the most overlooked piece of caching software ever!
It really is well worth having:
To answer you 80251:
The 4GB limit is NOT an Limit of eBoostr; is a limit of the FAT32 File system:
FAT32 cannot save files larger than 4GB, but you can use exFAT (faster) or NTFS (slower) and make the cache as big as you like in eBoostr.
NTFS is slower than exFAT as it has more logging and stuff going on.
But do set exFAT's
cluster size down to 4KB from the default 32KB to better suite the all-important small random I/O you want to speed up and to minimise Slack.
eBoostr is a FILE aware cache..!
That means you can exclude folders, files, file types, file sizes etc-etc from being cached.
That means stuff like the recycle bin and movie files and lisense.txt/rtf (which you have never opened and never will and have thousands of) can be excluded from being cached.
Similarly, you can drag and drop a link into eBoostr, hit build cache now, and your game or app is instantly cached, so you dont have to wait for the cache to warm up.
You can also cache as many drives of any type (RAID etc) to the same cache as you like.
Name one other caching solution that can do that. Just one...
eBoostr will read data from the cache AND from the original drive SIMULTANIOUSLY, in a kind of RAID 0, but with an emphasis on pulling the random 4K from the cache drive, leaving the original drive to do the large sequential reads is generally faster at.
Name one caching solution that can do that! I can, but no one wants to hear the word Readyboost anymore!
NB's:
eBoostr has DRAM caching built in, but that does NOT work on Win 7 (IIRC) and up.
It cant compete with Windows' caching anyway, so:
Do NOT try enabling it unless you run an OS that can't see the extra RAM above 3.25 GB like XP32 couldn't.
eBoostr comes from the days of spinning rust.
SSDs have a latency of less than a quarter millisecond where the latency of spinning rust is around 10 milliseconds.
That means that the caching software layer has WAY less time to 'think'.
But there were also way less uber fast CPU cores than today too.
That means that that you can increase the process priority of the eBooster service: EBsstrSvc.exe and/or affine it to specific cores or core complexes in Task Manager to give it a er... eBoost.
NB that I/O priority lags process process priority by one, so the I/O priority of setting the service to 'above normal' remains stock. And that's a good thing as getting your I/O priorities out of sync slows things down..!!
NNB:
eBoostr rebuilds its cache every hour.
So unless you specify an app/game and rebuild the cache immediately; don't expect the cache to work immediately!
And don't be a nana and expect it to show results in Crystal Diskmark etc: it will NOT cache the newly created, always different random data used by them for testing.
I'm running 2 1TB Seagate SSHDs striped in disk management, eBoostr cached to a 58GB Optane drive, connected through an AMD X570 chipset. (3900X CPU)
I chose Striped Dynamic Disk to keep AHCI and hopefully avoid confusing the SSHD's R4K read caching as RAID0 does. It didnt work and only R4K write caching doubles to around 9MB/s.
Here are my initial run off the striped SSHDs, vs what my Corsair MP600 would get, vs an eBoostr cached 1st run after specifying Shadowbringers:
Thats 2.67 seconds faster than the SSD would be...
(I have since changed up the Optane driver, from the stock/crap MS driver, to a mod Intel driver (to work on AMD) which is another ~90MB/s faster at R4K reads.
ie: R4K reads, with a properly aligned exFAT partition and clusters for Optane, is now around ~300MB/s vs the ~200MB/s used in the above pic)
It really is well worth having:
To answer you 80251:
The 4GB limit is NOT an Limit of eBoostr; is a limit of the FAT32 File system:
FAT32 cannot save files larger than 4GB, but you can use exFAT (faster) or NTFS (slower) and make the cache as big as you like in eBoostr.
NTFS is slower than exFAT as it has more logging and stuff going on.
But do set exFAT's
cluster size down to 4KB from the default 32KB to better suite the all-important small random I/O you want to speed up and to minimise Slack.
eBoostr is a FILE aware cache..!
That means you can exclude folders, files, file types, file sizes etc-etc from being cached.
That means stuff like the recycle bin and movie files and lisense.txt/rtf (which you have never opened and never will and have thousands of) can be excluded from being cached.
Similarly, you can drag and drop a link into eBoostr, hit build cache now, and your game or app is instantly cached, so you dont have to wait for the cache to warm up.
You can also cache as many drives of any type (RAID etc) to the same cache as you like.
Name one other caching solution that can do that. Just one...
eBoostr will read data from the cache AND from the original drive SIMULTANIOUSLY, in a kind of RAID 0, but with an emphasis on pulling the random 4K from the cache drive, leaving the original drive to do the large sequential reads is generally faster at.
Name one caching solution that can do that! I can, but no one wants to hear the word Readyboost anymore!
NB's:
eBoostr has DRAM caching built in, but that does NOT work on Win 7 (IIRC) and up.
It cant compete with Windows' caching anyway, so:
Do NOT try enabling it unless you run an OS that can't see the extra RAM above 3.25 GB like XP32 couldn't.
eBoostr comes from the days of spinning rust.
SSDs have a latency of less than a quarter millisecond where the latency of spinning rust is around 10 milliseconds.
That means that the caching software layer has WAY less time to 'think'.
But there were also way less uber fast CPU cores than today too.
That means that that you can increase the process priority of the eBooster service: EBsstrSvc.exe and/or affine it to specific cores or core complexes in Task Manager to give it a er... eBoost.
NB that I/O priority lags process process priority by one, so the I/O priority of setting the service to 'above normal' remains stock. And that's a good thing as getting your I/O priorities out of sync slows things down..!!
NNB:
eBoostr rebuilds its cache every hour.
So unless you specify an app/game and rebuild the cache immediately; don't expect the cache to work immediately!
And don't be a nana and expect it to show results in Crystal Diskmark etc: it will NOT cache the newly created, always different random data used by them for testing.
I'm running 2 1TB Seagate SSHDs striped in disk management, eBoostr cached to a 58GB Optane drive, connected through an AMD X570 chipset. (3900X CPU)
I chose Striped Dynamic Disk to keep AHCI and hopefully avoid confusing the SSHD's R4K read caching as RAID0 does. It didnt work and only R4K write caching doubles to around 9MB/s.
Here are my initial run off the striped SSHDs, vs what my Corsair MP600 would get, vs an eBoostr cached 1st run after specifying Shadowbringers:
Thats 2.67 seconds faster than the SSD would be...
(I have since changed up the Optane driver, from the stock/crap MS driver, to a mod Intel driver (to work on AMD) which is another ~90MB/s faster at R4K reads.
ie: R4K reads, with a properly aligned exFAT partition and clusters for Optane, is now around ~300MB/s vs the ~200MB/s used in the above pic)
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