Should i buy primocache?

[Shrek]

If you use a UPS(and if you're not, WTAF?!?), power outages are just not a serious problem.

I used to use a lot of UPS units when at a place with unreliable power, but with 3 PCs to maintain battery costs pile up and power in the new place is reliable.

I even went so far as to try develop new ways to desulphate lead acid batteries.
Desulfation in Lead-acid Batteries; a Novel (resistive) Approach : 3 Steps - Instructables

Even moved one UPS to supercapacitors

Replacing a UPS Battery With Super-Capacitors

Replacing a UPS Battery With Super-Capacitors: Got tired of replacing the lead-acid battery in a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), so put together a super-capacitor array to go in its place. Such units are now commercially available https://www.marathon-power.com/supercapacitor-ups....

www.instructables.com

 

[lexluthermiester]

I used to use a lot of UPS units when at a place with unreliable power, but with 3 PCs to maintain battery costs pile up and power in the new place is reliable.

I even went so far as to try develop new ways to desulphate lead acid batteries.

I've had my UPS for 6 or 7 years and have have replaced the battery once(just recently actually).

Just joining this thread, but I did go back to day 1, almost 2 years ago, and read it all.

I have to wonder if today, with a fully updated W10 and W11 system, if typical users would actually notice any improvement in a double-blind, side-by-side, A/B comparison? I suspect most will not because contrary to what many believe, Windows and most of today's major applications are actually very good at resource management.

There are exceptions, of course. I suspect if someone has gobs of RAM but a slow hard drive, they will notice a difference with some applications. But more and more computers are using SSDs, either exclusively or for the boot drive and even the slowest SSD will run circles around the fastest hard drive.

Another concern is the price. To me, no way is $49.95 for the "Pro" version worth it - so not even going to address that.

I personally do not think the $29.95 (for 1 computer) for the standard license is worth it either - after reading the License Limitations and Policies. The agreement in English loses something in translation, but the key points are, the license, when installed "offline", is inextricably tied to that original computer/motherboard - just like an OEM license. And it cannot be transferred to a new computer (or new motherboard). Period.

If you install using an "online" license, it seems you can transfer the license up to 5 times. HOWEVER, you can only do this by contacting Romax by email and request the transfer. At that time (if approved, I assume) they will deactivate the license, "then inform you."

I'm not sure what "then inform you" really means but this process concerns me because it would appear the online version is a bit different from the offline version. I note the following from that License Policies link,


This clearly suggests the online version, the only license transferable to a new computer, requires Internet access and apparently, uses some "cloud" or Romex based access. That does not sit well with me.

With some of these comments you seem to be trying to pick a fight rather than contribute to the conversation. Please stop or the mods will be asked to show you the way out, again.

 

[Shrek]

I am thinking to try lithium (for fun)

 

[Belfaborac]

Sorry for being a bit late to the party, have had a very busy week.

Back in 2021 when I did some benchmark runs, the general conclusion was that a 3GB or 4GB cache was the sweet spot. However, (IIRC)Mussels did some testing that showed that the more system RAM you have, the better benefit the you got from a larger cache, but with diminishing returns, as with my testing. 6GB seem to be the effective ceiling for most use-case scenario's.

Thanks a lot for chiming in; much appreciated! It's not exactly a time-critical issue, so this once you're excused. For now, as I'm still on 32GB (64GB to arrive tomorrow), I've set up a 2GB cache on C: which shows the same kind of numbers shown by Mussels above.

For me the risk is too high; if the machine crashes, the more that is still in RAM, the more that is lost.

My Micron/Crucial SSD actually has a "Momentum Cache" option, which is a RAM cache, but I didn't turn it on because of the hightened corruption risk.
"Using Momentum Cache without a battery backed power source is not recommended and you do so at your own risk."

To be fair, full system crashes are very uncommon these days are are effectively a relic from a by-gone-age of computing.

If you use a UPS(and if you're not, WTAF?!?), power outages are just not a serious problem.

I can't really remember when I last had a full system crash happen and I do have the machine hooked up to a UPS, so I'm not unduly worried. Power outages happen *maybe* once a year, if/when there's a serious thunderstorm which passes close to my house, but due to the UPS and fairly hefty surge protectors I've never been affected.

I have to wonder if today, with a fully updated W10 and W11 system, if typical users would actually notice any improvement in a double-blind, side-by-side, A/B comparison? I suspect most will not because contrary to what many believe, Windows and most of today's major applications are actually very good at resource management.

I suspect the same, but in my case I'm not after noticeable improvements in performance, but rather the lessening of "wear and tear" on my most hard-working SSDs. My download & work drive is down to 95% life expectancy after ~8 months of use, so any palliative effects the cache may have on it will be welcome. However, in terms of noticeable improvements the effect of moving browser caches to a RAM drive was easy to pick up on.

As far as licenses go, I think you're being a little pessimistic. My PrimoCache license is actually many years old, originally bought for a very different computer. I didn't have a transaction number and couldn't remember if I had used PayPal or their other payment solution, so I just sent them an email and asked if they had anything in their filing cabinet pertaining to my email address. About 4 hours later I was sent the details. I followed up with a couple of questions in separate emails, both of which were answered equally promptly. Quite confidence inspiring I thought.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I am thinking to try lithium (for fun)

That might work well as long as the charging circuit is capable of charging and trickle-charging LithiumIron batteries. This is something you should look into before and test with a spare UPS before going full force into. When you buy one, open a thread and tag me. I'd enjoy seeing the process you work through. I might even join you in testing.

However, I digress, we're getting off-topic..

Thanks a lot for chiming in; much appreciated! It's not exactly a time-critical issue, so this once you're excused.

LOL!

For now, as I'm still on 32GB (64GB to arrive tomorrow), I've set up a 2GB cache on C: which shows the same kind of numbers shown by Mussels above.

With 64GB, you should be able to benefit from a 6GB or 8GB cache. With that much RAM, your system will not feel a performance hit from RAM performance, but should feel snappier on disc access times. Remember also the Windows pagefile. I can't remember where it was discussed, but Windows does not manage the pagefile well when such a large cache is employed. It would be best to lock the pagefile size to minimize drive-write-thrashing. Whether on SSD or HDD, this is always of benefit to over-all performance and in the case of SSDs, prevents unnecessary erase-write operations and thus prevents excess wear.

 

[Shrek]

Super-Capacitors might also interest you
Replacing a UPS Battery With Super-Capacitors : 5 Steps - Instructables

This one I did build and use for a while; I only stopped because the ferro-resonant UPS I was using was costing me too much in electricity.

But yes, I stop now as you are right about drifting off topic.

 

[Belfaborac]

With 64GB, you should be able to benefit from a 6GB or 8GB cache. With that much RAM, your system will not fell a performance hit of RAM performance, but should feel snappier on disc access times. Remember also the Windows pagefile. I can't remember where it was discussed, but Windows does not manage the pagefile well when such a large cache is employed. It would be best to lock the pagefile size to minimize drive-write-thrashing. Whether on SSD or HDD, this is always of benefit to over-all performance and in the case of SSDs, prevents unnecessary erase-write operations and thus prevents excess wear.

The pagefile has already been relocated to an 8GB RAMdisk, along with browser cache and temp folders. I'm unsure what either one contributes (except the browser cache relocation making the browser feel much snappier), but I'm fairly sure the whole shebang feels a little more responsive. Placebo is a possibility of course, but not in regards to the browser - there the difference is too marked.

 

[Bill_Bright]

With some of these comments you seem to be trying to pick a fight rather than contribute to the conversation. Please stop or the mods will be asked to show you the way out, again.

Wow. I might suggest letting the mods do the moderating instead of trying to second guess the motives of others.

I believe I was pretty clear I was expressing my opinions, thoughts and concerns about the product now that Microsoft has had a couple more years to fine tune W10 and W11.

I suspect the same, but in my case I'm not after noticeable improvements in performance, but rather the lessening of "wear and tear" on my most hard-working SSDs. My download & work drive is down to 95% life expectancy after ~8 months of use

Down 5% in just 8 months is, indeed, pretty drastic. While wear and tear issues with current generation SSDs is often over-exaggerated, you seem to be one of the exceptions and to that, your reasons for using PrimoCache make sense.

As far as licenses go, I think you're being a little pessimistic.

I was only repeating what the company posted. It is reassuring to hear they were responsive, in a positive way to your requests.

 

[95Viper]

Get back to the topic!
Stop your bickering and arguing.
Don't be guessing what the Moderation team may do, so as to intimidate other posters.

 

[chrcoluk]

I see two main benefits of primocache, both write related.

Modern NTFS now even on forced async will flush writes after 5 seconds, this is to minimise any potential loss of data on blue screens, power loss etc. Now on a slow hdd copying from a fast source, you wont have an issue for 5 seconds, but then the reads become bottlenecked as the data starts to be flushed, the most obvious example is if you extracting a 7zip file, first 5 seconds fast, then bottlenecked by the hdd. If you use the primocache write cache this behaviour is adjustable, if the behaviour bothers you. Certain writes marked as urgent will bypass primocache, I dont know what counts as urgent. (I assume fsync type writes)

Second use case is why I brought my license to experiment with is to reduce frequency of writes for things that make lots of small writes, especially rewrites. To reduce the overhead of browsers constantly flushing data, the windows logs, and registry writes.

I think if not using L2, I dont see a benefit in the ram based read cache, as windows already caches reads aggressively anyway even to the point it will swap data out super early to preserve its read cache. If using L2 though then a fast SSD could be utilised to act as a cache for slow HDD's, kind of like how SSHD's work. My issue with this is I think the only use case is if someone is so short of money all they can afford is one very small SSD, so they just use it as a cache for the most frequent read files, but then that person also probably cant afford primocache.

Be interesting to learn use cases people have found.

 

[Eskimonster]

I´m all in for stuff that improves my gaming experience, are there any new reviews of this thing ?

 

[Magic Cube]

More than couple years ago I did use PrimoCache Server-edition at my work. Network speed was okay with ram cache and SSD cache enabled. Until drive which was used as SSD cache(Samsung 840 128GB) died. Speed in network did drop when this did happen, I don't remember how much it did lower speeds.

After that there was server upgrade to sata SSD's and I also stopped using PrimoCache after this. One of those sata SSD's also has died and was replaced with Kingston KC3000 NVME. Original drive was WD red 2TB, it just decided to die.

But if I would use normal HDD's these days, I would probably use Primocache or something similar program. But I am never going to use HDD in my personal rig, as I don't have that much data which I would like keep safe and the noise those drives do.

 

[Belfaborac]

64GB in place and I've set the C: cache to 4GB, work drive to 8GB and I've also given an 8GB unified cache to my game drives. I'll see if I can determine if there are any tangible gains from all this, but even just the 25-35% reduction in write activity on the C: drive is worth it to me. I'm a great believer in using things until they're well and truly spent and any delay to when I have to ditch the drive will be welcome. Same goes for the work drive, although I guess the benefit there will be much reduced.

Big thanks to Mussels and lexluthermiester for the initial info and recent pointers!

 

[Shrek]

I made sure I had more than enough RAM, so paging will almost never happen.

 

[Mussels]

To be fair, full system crashes are very uncommon these days are are effectively a relic from a by-gone-age of computing.

My brothers system (which was a copy of mine) managed to crash out and corrupt his bootloader somehow, and we suspect his cache was involved.
He ran an untested overclock on his CPU (the +200 PBO setting) that ran into single threaded instability and left it alone for several weeks because he'd "checked" it wasn't active, incorrectly.


There is a risk - but it takes a lot of intentional things to do to make that risk greater than one in a million.
Hell he's also got a samsung 980 Pro (I've got the 970 Pro), so his issues could be related to those drive issues totally unrelated to primocache even on the latest firmware for it.

He also had backups of his OS drive and could have easily restored the boot partition in seconds, but managed to erase them instead of restore them somehow


I've got a solar setup with a lithium battery and a normal UPS and a BIG warning - do NOT use a lithium battery on something designed for other types.
SLA types with a liquid run upto 16v to balance their cells, and they'll often do that to newer AGM types let alone Lifepo4 and damage them.
Lithiums don't self discharge to even a very slow amps limited charge like a 1W trickle charge would lead to over-charging and damged cells at risk of a fire.

I went through 5 different MPPT chargers for my setup before i found one with proper lithium support that didn't overvolt in 'float' state, and i'm quite confident UPS's won't have multiple battery profiles

The pagefile has already been relocated to an 8GB RAMdisk, along with browser cache and temp folders. I'm unsure what either one contributes (except the browser cache relocation making the browser feel much snappier), but I'm fairly sure the whole shebang feels a little more responsive. Placebo is a possibility of course, but not in regards to the browser - there the difference is too marked.

That's more or less what a write cache does for browsers - being TRIM aware has it reading any content recently written from the RAM cache as well as un-deleting content to avoid writes, so it ends up feeling a fair bit faster.

 

[Shrek]

I've got a solar setup with a lithium battery and a normal UPS and a BIG warning - do NOT use a lithium battery on something designed for other types.
SLA types with a liquid run upto 16v to balance their cells, and they'll often do that to newer AGM types let alone Lifepo4 and damage them.
Lithiums don't self discharge to even a very slow amps limited charge like a 1W trickle charge would lead to over-charging and damged cells at risk of a fire.

I went through 5 different MPPT chargers for my setup before i found one with proper lithium support that didn't overvolt in 'float' state, and i'm quite confident UPS's won't have multiple battery profiles

Unless they have BMS protection
Dakota Lithium 12v 10ah Battery | Dakota Lithium Batteries

Off topic, but of great interest in my opinion; you should open up a new thread.

 

[95Viper]

Last warning!
Stay on topic.
If you wish to discuss some other tech... start a thread in the appropriate forum.

 

[80251]

To be fair, full system crashes are very uncommon these days are are effectively a relic from a by-gone-age of computing.


If you use a UPS(and if you're not, WTAF?!?), power outages are just not a serious problem.

I wish full system crashes were "very uncommon" for me but trying to get my memory to 4000Mhz. has resulted in too many system crashes to count.

@chrcoluk, the romex primocache website had a forum post where someone was using ONLY the L1 RAM cache of primocache -- as a gigantic RAM disk that was persistent. I forget why, but it was an interesting use case.

 

[Mussels]

I wish full system crashes were "very uncommon" for me but trying to get my memory to 4000Mhz. has resulted in too many system crashes to count.

@chrcoluk, the romex primocache website had a forum post where someone was using ONLY the L1 RAM cache of primocache -- as a gigantic RAM disk that was persistent. I forget why, but it was an interesting use case.

I could totally see someone running VM's from a ramdrive for funsies
these caches seem focused on smaller files, so it seems like they're not ideal for bigger files

This should be discussed in another thread if people care about it, but it's something that would explain why caching SSD content makes a big difference when it shouldn't for gaming load times for some of us - defragging individual FILES on the drives, but not the whole SSD.

Spoiler: sorry 95viper, it's borderline on topic

NVME's spread data through as many NAND flash as possible to maximise the read speed, but being fragmented still slows them down - moves them into the 4k random territory instead of sequential.

In a shocking twist no one expects, this would make my games slower even on an NVME - caching would make it seem faster, but not fix the actual issue.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I wish full system crashes were "very uncommon" for me but trying to get my memory to 4000Mhz.

Unless you're using a Ryzen APU, you can downclock your RAM to 3800 or 3600 without losing more than a very little bit of performance and you will gain stability. If you're on Intel, same story. Stability is more important than speed.

 

[80251]

I see your point Lex, but I really want to hit that 4000Mhz. mark on my 9700k.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I see your point Lex, but I really want to hit that 4000Mhz. mark on my 9700k.

Oh man. Your 9700k will not be affected by a drop to 3800mhz or 3600mhz. I'm just saying, stability over speed. Stability is especially important for PrimoCache.

 

[80251]

@Lex
Getting my DDR4 to 4000Mhz. isn't just a goal, it's a quest!