Fancycache + HDD vs SSD

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cheflo

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Mar 16, 2013
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Hi there,
My girlfriend's three years old Sony Vaio laptop is getting really slow so I will perform a clean Win7 64bit install on it in a couple of weeks. While at it, I'm considering getting her to upgrade a component or two. I'm suggesting her to buy a 120 GB SSD, but she is reluctant to spend $100 so I'm thinking of suggesting 8 GB of RAM for $50 instead and then use 1-2 GB with FancyCache. I have tested this a little myself on both my SSD and HDD, but my system is already quite snappy so I can't notice much of a difference, if any.

So it comes down to:

1. $100 - A decent 120 GB SSD (Her computer has SATA 2, but I don't think it has room for a secondary drive, maybe I can remove the CD bay).
2. $50 - Going from 2 x 2GB/800MHz to 2 x 4GB/1333MHz RAM of which 1-2 GB would be used with FancyCache.

She does nothing hardcore on her computer, the regular browsing and MS Office stuff. Here is the GPU and CPU in case there are some more obvious upgrades that I have overlooked:

CPU - Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo T6600 @ 2.20GHz
GPU - NVIDIA Geforce 230M
Some input would be much appreciated,

Cheers
 
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cheflo

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Mar 16, 2013
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The OS is Win7, I edited the question to include that it is 64 bit and SATA2



They are both a waste of money for what she does. Windows already uses the unused ram as cache anyway and using other software to do it is not a wise idea. Especially.something called "fancycache"
Click to expand...

So you think a clean install will be enough to make everything run smooth again? I will obviously try this first, but I thought that an upgrade might be in palce as well to extend the life time of the laptop.

Fancycache uses block cache and windows uses file cache so I'm thinking that there would be some areas where it could be more beneficial with the combination of the two. Maybe 8 GB of RAM is not enough to set aside a portion of the RAM for fancy cache though.


 
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geofelt

geofelt

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Oct 9, 2006
54,298
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I have replaced the hard drive in all my laptops, including some very old ones.
Let me tell you the result is magical! Even with old tech and slow cpu's, performance is very snappy.
Laptop hard drives are tuned for battery savings at the expense of performance.

The $100 you spend on a SSD will be worth every penny.
And... do not worry about sata 2. It does not impact random performance, and sequential performance will still be 3x faster than her hard drive. I do not know if the sony vaio bios has AHCI as an option or not. If not, losing trim is not the end of the world.
My current laptop is a vaio S and the bios options are almost non existent.
 
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darkstar01

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May 31, 2008
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Actually FancyCache is an amazing program, it is still beta currently and we don't know what pricing will be like, but I've gotten as high as 99% hit rate with FancyCache using 16gb of Ram for a Ram Cache plus a 32gb SATA3 SSD drive as an SSD Cache, the combined operating together has me running at near SSD speeds with my 3TB 7200 RPM 64mb cached drive. FancyCache loads before the OS so it improves boot speed similar to how SanDisk ExpressCache functions, except FancyCache has Tremendously better Caching performance versus just SanDisk ExpressCache Alone. FancyCache is also more efficient than windows built in caching technology, its even faster than ReadyBoost using an SSD drive. (Yes you can use a SSD as a ready-boost cache, I've done it just to test the speed increase, it was marginal at best, but it did help a bit, FancyCache is still faster.)

However when dealing with slower SSD drives (since SSD IS slower than RAM.) FancyCache has a L2 cache defer feature that defers the write until the drive is currently done writing, that way you don't overwealm the CPU or get Read/Write Misses... Misses slow down caching performance considerably... now if you have a high speed SSD then you shouldn't have to defer more than 1-5seconds Mine is currently running at 1 second deferred writes, the default is 10 seconds for slower drives.
 
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