Topic: TIPS: If you have alot of RAM over in your computer "Super Cache"

[Pez]

TIPS: If you have alot of RAM over in your computer and wan't faster disk I/O "Super Cache"

OVERVIEW

SuperCache Express™ 5 for Desktop Systems

SuperCache Express™ breaks the disk I/O bottleneck by using the computer's RAM to hold or contain the most frequently used disk data. This 'container' is referred to as a cache. With SuperCache, as a program sends and receives disk data, the most frequently used data is read from and written to RAM – not the hard drive – thus accelerating the program's performance. SuperCache implements our patented block-level cache technology to increase performance above that of the operating system’s file-level cache.

SuperCache is an excellent choice for these scenarios:

1. The data files are larger than available physical memory.

2. The data files are located on a disk partition or disk volume that is too large to fit into available physical memory, and cannot be moved to one where they will fit.

3. Minimum risk of lost data.

Unlike our RamDisk products not all the data will be available in RAM all the time. Some will come from the hard drive. Nonetheless, depending upon the size of the cache and the nature of the disk I/O demands, performance accelerations can be significant and often dramatic.

SuperCache is not recommended for a boot volume (usually C:) .
Use only on non-boot data volumes.


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Deferred-write mode

By enabling its lazy-write mechanism, SuperCache can also accelerate writing data to disk. This mechanism delays writes to the hard drive. This can 'smooth out' I/O activity on the hard drive. It is important to note that enabling lazy-write increases the risk of data loss in the event of a system crash or power failure. SuperSpeed Software recommends that enabling the lazy-write feature ONLY on systems equipped with an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS).
 

Support for NUMA
 
Starting with Windows XP x64 through Wndows 7 x64 provides special support for machines with a non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA). When active on such platforms, the memory manager for SuperCache Express examines the processor and memory affinities reported by Windows and the ACPI SRAT, and then optimizes physical memory allocations across the described NUMA nodes. The NUMA support in SuperCache greatly improves the speed of memory allocations and equalizes the distribution of cache allocations among the NUMA nodes. Currently, NUMA support does not include the ability to build caches on specific nodes.
 
New Interface

 SuperCache Express now has a more user friendly and informative interface.
• Overview of available storage drives in system
• Caching graph showing 4 performance items
• Configure SuperCache by right clicking any non-boot data volume
 
Added Feature called "Mirror Mode"

SuperCache Mirror Mode (formerly a separate product called SuperVolume) allows the user to duplicate an entire volume/partition into RAM. Learn more about Mirror Mode.

Click here to download fully-functional trial software.

Quick start instructions:

 There are two ways to configure SuperCache Express (SCE) either from Graphical User Interface(GUI) or via the Command Line Interface(CLI).

To configure or modify caching from the GUI
 1) Double click the desktop icon.
 2) Select a volume
 3) Select either the first menubar icon OR Action -> Cache

 - OR -

 To access SCE from the CLI
 1) Open a Command Prompt with Administrative privileges
 2) Type "vfcfg -help" will provide an overview of the command line syntax.


SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• Windows 7 32 & 64-bit

• Windows Vista 32 & 64-bit

• Windows XP Professional, 32 & 64-bit with SP3

• Windows 2000 is NOT supported


Processor (CPU) Support

• 1 G Hz processor or higher

• All Intel and AMD Pentium-class platforms

• All Intel 64-bit processor families (except Itanium)

• All AMD 64-bit processor families

• All SMP (i.e. number of CPUs) configurations of the above that are supported by Windows™. (see table below)
 
Operating system edition                        Maximum RAM        Approx.% available for cache        CPUs*
Windows 7 32-bit(x86)                                    4 GB                                    50%                                  2
Windows 7 64-bit(x64)                                    8-192 GB                           75-95%                               2
Windows Vista 32-bit(x86)                               4 GB                                    50%                                  2
Windows Vista 64-bit(x64)                               8-128 GB                           50%-95%                            2
Windows XP Professional 32-bit(x86)                4 GB                                     75%                                 2
Windows XP Professional 64-bit(x64)                128 GB                                  95%                                2

*Socket limit that the operating system supports.
 For more information see: Memory Limits for Windows Releases

Memory Support

• System Minimum: 2 GB RAM (Minumum cache size = 128 MB)

• Recommended: 4 GB or greater

• Maximum: as per the amount recognized by Microsoft Windows™. (see table above)

• Types: all including SDRAM, DDR, DDR2, DDR3, Rambus etc.

• Supports use of "Unmanaged Memory (UM)" for 32-bit Windows operating systems. UM allows SuperCache 5 to access memory above the 4 GB OS limit. (see table above)
 
Other considerations:

• Caching a boot volume (typically C:) is not recommend.

• 16 MB free disk space for installation

• Version History

• Quick Refenence (pdf)


Price: $79.95

http://www.superspeed.com/desktop/supercache.php

Some more links about the product and some spec:

http://youtu.be/V6G8EdcF1P0

Or if you just need a fast RAM Disk.

http://youtu.be/3oyLR6eVHPI

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152548

[roxysoftmind]

Really good information, i was looking a solotuions how to boost my disk performance and this information useful for me
i will give a try and have look

[devnullius]

Thanx for the info - I just hope it will make my right-click options finally appear IMMEDIATELY  instead of after a few minutes or so :s

I'll be testing soon, I found two torrent by ZWT for version 5 of this product.

Unclear to me is what the following actually means (quote):
"
1. The data files are larger than available physical memory.

2. The data files are located on a disk partition or disk volume that is too large to fit into available physical memory, and cannot be moved to one where they will fit. "

And why NOT on your systemdisk??

Till repost I guess ; )

Karma!

Devvie


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[devnullius]

No testing by me - for it only support Windows up to version 7 - not 8 :s

But fun to see (http://www.superspeed.com/servers/ramdisk.php) is that they kept the old MS-DOS RamDisk alive :> One must appreciate that! No idea what I should put on it, but still - I like the idea that I could do it, some day.

More technical information about SuperCache can be found here: http://www.superspeed.com/servers/supercache.php . Apparently the RamDisk can be bigger than physical memory, which might explain the quoted remarks I did not understand in the last post.

Without testing, nothing I can do - feedback from others sure is appreciated.


Karma!


devnullius

[ibu]

This really helped on my Alienware Laptop