• Welcome to TechPowerUp Forums, Guest! Please check out our forum guidelines for info related to our community.
  • The forums have been upgraded with support for dark mode. By default it will follow the setting on your system/browser. You may override it by scrolling to the end of the page and clicking the gears icon.

Putting two HDD's with different cache sizes in RAID 0. EDIT: Is PrimoCache worth it?

Joined
Nov 22, 2020
Messages
13 (0.01/day)
Does putting two HDD's with different cache sizes in RAID0 effect performance? Both drives are 2TB 7200RPM SATA III 6.0Gb/s except one has 64mb cache and the other has 128mb cache/buffer size.
 
I have only ever used identical drives and currently do. I’m not sure TBH if you even can but no hurt in trying I don’t think the Cache would make any difference if you can in fact build an array with “different“ drives
 
You can make arrays with different drive specs of any kind, its just that you may end up with weird side effects to performance by doing so.
 
Interesting question. It's my belief (and can't find anything to contradict it), that technically speaking, it shouldn't "affect performance" at all. It's not going to behave worse than a raid with 2 64-Mb cache drives. At worst, it won't respond as well as a 128Mb pair, but the OS really doesn't care about which drive the data comes from, more than "technically". The OS requests the data, the drive/RAID knows where the data is spread, it reads the data from the array, and maybe the caching lets it get the data a bit quicker from the 128Mb "side", but that just means it goes back for the next piece just a little quicker. I would expect, if the data is spread evenly (highly unlikely), that the 128mb drive will just spend milli/microseconds longer in idle than the 64mb. Otherwise, no real major effect. You'll still be limited by how fast the 64Mb drive can return its data.
 
I found a program called PrimoCache.

I got these results using a 32GB USB 3.0 flash drive. But it eats up a lot of RAM to get this, 13.248GB's to be exact. I was waiting for AMD to update StoreMI to support RAID but this. Video games are pretty big in size right now so I'm waiting until next month before I install another game to test load times.

PrimoCache.png


asdasdsadas.png


Unfortunately I accidently broke my Intel Optane memory module. I was in a panic. Any SSD's I had, there was a very nasty virus/ransomware that was copying itself so that's gone.

I'm thinking of buying another 32GB's of memory and a cheap nvme SSD. That should cost around $150.
 
I use Primocache, but I do not use the RAM cache. It puts your data a risk. However, I use the SSD caching for my hard drives and it works great. On my main rig I have a cheap 512GB SATA SSD caching my 8TB game hard drive and games load like they are on an SSD.
 
caching with a USB drive doesnt work for writes, as you still have to wait for the cache to finish writing anyway - you could think its safe to remove when its not

i just want something that does read-caching in my RAM, but not writes


edit: hey primocache has a lot of features that we'rent obvious, such as setting read only caching.
 
Last edited:
I don't know the answer and I fear checking with the drive manufacture's will not be helpful. Drives of different sizes obviously limit your usage to the smaller of the two.

We test RAID in the desktop every 3 years or so .... outside of very specific applications, i.e. video editing and animation, we have never observed a performance gain in any application. Over the last 20 years, I have read every test I could find, but lately it's become dead issue and no one bothers any more.

In our last test we did twin SSDs (Samsung Pro) in RAID 0 and twin SSHDs (2 TB, 7200 rpm) in RAID 1 .... we did not see any performance improvements with the RAID ) setup ... Samsung Magician was not usable and whn we contacted Samsung TS for assistance they advised that "RAID 0" was neither recommeneded or supported on their products. The RAID 1 array did it's job but was problematic, every 9 or 10 boots one the the drives would disappear ... we broke the array and set up a free backup utility to mirror the second drive twice a day.

I have fiddled with RAM drives but with the apps we use (Primarily AutoCAD), never saw any benefits.
 
Back
Top