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Recommendations for disk caching software?

C

Canned Noodles

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System Specs
Processor i9-11900K
Motherboard Asus ROG Maximus XIII Hero
Cooling Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360
Memory 4x8GB DDR4
Video Card(s) Alienware RTX 3090 OEM
Storage OEM Kioxia 2tb NVMe (OS), 4TB WD Blue HDD (games)
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Audio Device(s) Logitech Pro X Wireless
Power Supply Corsair RM1000x
Keyboard HyperX Alloy Elite 2
I have this old workstation that boots from a hard drive, and it just seems sluggish, especially when I try to open games. It has 72GB of memory so I thought I might as well make use of it. Does anyone have any experience with this or suggestions you would like to share?
 
more details, asking for a museum.
 
Windows will automatically use all memory a disk cache. The problem is that you need to read from disk first to fill the cache.

Just buy a cheap SSD
 
Even if you setup a RAM disk, you'll need to load it from the HDD at startup, and dump it to the HDD on shut down.

It's gonna take a while each time... can be a matter of minutes, depends on the size.

Oh, and if you get a BSOD or a tiny power failure, you should expect to lose a lot of data.
 
I am curious as to how you got to 72GB? That is not a common amount. While certainly possible, it would take an unusual combination to get to 72GB.

9 x 8GB, for example would get you there- assuming the board supports that many sticks. Or 4 x 16GB + 1 x 8GB. There are other combinations that could involve 4GB and 32GB sticks as well.

But most, not all, but most systems have an "even" number of sticks - again, depending on the board. I don't remember having ever seen 72GB before.

How much free disk space do you have?
 
Thanks for the replies, I think I’ll get an SSD

Bill_Bright said:
I am curious as to how you got to 72GB? That is not a common amount. While certainly possible, it would take an unusual combination to get to 72GB.

9 x 8GB, for example would get you there- assuming the board supports that many sticks. Or 4 x 16GB + 1 x 8GB. There are other combinations that could involve 4GB and 32GB sticks as well.

But most, not all, but most systems have an "even" number of sticks - again, depending on the board. I don't remember having ever seen 72GB before.

How much free disk space do you have?
Click to expand...
Sorry I didn’t see your message earlier, I hadn’t refreshed the tab in a while so it did not show up. The computer in question uses dual xeons with triple channel memory, and it’s from the same generation as the first generation i7s. The disk is 2TB and <25% filled
 
Last edited:
So it has 9 x 8GB installed?
 
The only disk caching software still sold commercially is primocache -- all their other competitors seemed to have died off.

I was using an NVME M.2 1 TiB SK-hynix P31 Gold to cache my 2 TiB applications/games/music Toshiba 2 TiB HDD. It was great while it lasted, but the HDD died and so now I'm using it to cache my much slower 4 TiB Samsung QVO SATA SSD, mostly because I have no other use for it and don't want to go through the hassle of removing it.
The load times for my games off my 2 TiB HDD when cached by primocache to the sk-hynix P31 Gold and my Samsung QVO 4 TiB SATA SSD differ by less than 2 secs.
 
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