Quote Originally Posted by Ao1 View Post
^^ A significant portion of I/O activity occurs within the windows file system without touching the storage device.

I think the objective of fancy cache is to better manage the Windows file system cache by using different algorithms to try and keep useful data in cache, thus limiting the requirements to re- read from the device to obtain dropped cache data.

Better cache management can in theory be very beneficial if the storage device is slow or if the cache management program can be specially tweaked for a particular application. I've tried fancy cache with SSD and it made no perceivable performance difference to me.

Windows does an excellent job at managing cache for general use. Of course there will always be situations when a more focused cache management system could do better for a particular task, but it might at the same time also slow things down elsewhere in the process.

SSD's are so fast that it negates the benefit that might be seen with HDD.

I'm surprised you are seeing more writes. Normal I would say it's a 10 to 1 (or less) ratio between reads and writes. Do you do a lot of tasks that write data?

Regarding write caching, don't forget that SSD's also combine writes to reduce wear. This happens within the SSD itself.

My 2c anyways. Maybe there is a better explaination on cache OS/ Cache programes work.
Again, it's not a special setup or usage pattern that's hitting writes harder, it's bog standard on both, regular xp x64 doing regular use, browsing, gaming, movies, text editing, etc. It doesn't take long to see the write heavy usage pattern of windows, install fancycache and keep the performance statistics window open. Fancycache is better than drive write combining, it can combine more because it can be set to delay writes longer and on a larger pool of data(my setup being ten minute write delay on a 2gb cache.)

>SSD's are so fast that it negates the benefit that might be seen with HDD.

There is a point of diminishing returns, fancycache gets you there without having to wait for the next gen SSDs or spending a few grand on a caching controller and SSD RAID setup or high priced PCIe SSD drive.