Show us your SSD performance 2

[Maxxwire]

Gave Fancy Cache a Go!

When I first heard of Fancy Cache here on the Win 7 Forums I downloaded it and set it the same day on my Win 7 desktop and I then used Crystal Disk Mark x64 to fine tune the settings. As you can see from the screenshots above there was an amazing improvement in the computer's Intel 320 120 GB SSD after setting up Fancy Cache.

I ran a number of tests to see what impact Fancy Cache was having on the performance of my computer and the one and only improvement I found was that my graphics program opened up in 3 seconds which was twice as fast as it used to.

After about 6 hours of running Fancy Cache all of the drives suddenly disappeared in explorer and while I was trying to figure out how to rectify the problem the computer blue screened! Since this very stable Win 7 OS has never blue screened since I installed it in July of 2010 I attributed the problem to the most recently installed software and I felt it was best to part with the amazingly fast benchtests that Fancy Cache renders.

 

[Britton30]

Maxxwire if you'd like to try again, this is how I have been running it for several day now with no issues.

 

[A Guy]

The question begs to be asked. Does it just inflate the benchmark, or are there actual speed improvements in actual use. And more importantly, are such huge improvements actually felt?

A Guy

 

[whs]

The question begs to be asked. Does it just inflate the benchmark, or are there actual speed improvements in actual use. And more importantly, are such huge improvements actually felt?

A Guy

Bill, that is a very good question. I was just about to ask the same. Maybe Gary can enlighten us.

 

[Britton30]

There is a noticeable performance increase with Photoshop opening and rendering speed and with how long CCleaner takes to run. Word opens in less than a second.

Overall though the performance increase doesn't relate to the benchmarks increase. For example my 4K numbers are more than 10X normal with caching enabled, but the machine is not 10X faster. My reboots are still in the 60+second range. Due to Fancy Cache is dormant until w7 starts I think.

 

[whs]

So bottom line - it's not really worth it except for some select applications. I wonder what it would do for video encoding, because I do that a lot and that is always tedious - even with the i7, 8GB of RAM and the SSD.

 

[Parman]

So bottom line - it's not really worth it except for some select applications. I wonder what it would do for video encoding, because I do that a lot and that is always tedious - even with the i7, 8GB of RAM and the SSD.

That is a test I would love to see. I might even just try it out.

 

[Britton30]

So bottom line - it's not really worth it except for some select applications. I wonder what it would do for video encoding, because I do that a lot and that is always tedious - even with the i7, 8GB of RAM and the SSD.

Good question wolfgang, I haven't tried it. If encoding is changing from, say, .mkv to mp4, I can give it a try with Handbrake, tomorrow maybe.

 

[JerometheGiraff]

A program can speed up your SSD :huh:

 

[A Guy]

It would have surprised me if the performance increase matched the benchmarks increase, which seem incredible. It's likely the program has some effect, but is specifically written to do well on benchmarks? Do you think the performance increase is worth it? And are there any drawbacks? Perhaps increased writes, or shortening the life of the SSD somehow? My system is fast enough for me, but if this worked as it seemed, I'd be surprised if it wouldn't be written about everywhere. A Guy

 

[whs]

So bottom line - it's not really worth it except for some select applications. I wonder what it would do for video encoding, because I do that a lot and that is always tedious - even with the i7, 8GB of RAM and the SSD.

Good question wolfgang, I haven't tried it. If encoding is changing from, say, .mkv to mp4, I can give it a try with Handbrake, tomorrow maybe.

That would be nice if you can try that. Just today I spent a couple of hours encoding videos. It takes a lot of time once they are 250MB+.

 

[kbrady1979]

I can't wait until Handbrake starts supporting QuickSync.......you wanna talk about fast encoding.....that is FAST!

 

[Britton30]

So bottom line - it's not really worth it except for some select applications. I wonder what it would do for video encoding, because I do that a lot and that is always tedious - even with the i7, 8GB of RAM and the SSD.

Good question wolfgang, I haven't tried it. If encoding is changing from, say, .mkv to mp4, I can give it a try with Handbrake, tomorrow maybe.

That would be nice if you can try that. Just today I spent a couple of hours encoding videos. It takes a lot of time once they are 250MB+.

Well here's the results of some unprofessional tests. The original file was a 299MB .mkv file and I used the High Profile pre-set in Handbrake to encode it to .mp4, which came out to 719MB with Cache OFF and 519MB with Cache ON, can't figure that out.
with Cache ON the operation was a mere 4 seconds faster. So, I see no real world advantage to using FancyCache.

 

[whs]

Thanks Gary for the test. That's really peanuts. How long did the whole encoding take.

 

[Britton30]

12:57 cache OFF, 13:01 cache ON.

 

[whs]

So the 4 seconds gain were really a nit.

 

[Parman]

that's to bad I was hoping for some performance increase.

Bottom line its not really worth doing for me at least.

 

[Britton30]

More like a micro-nit, really.

 

[Maxxwire]

Do you think the performance increase is worth it? And are there any drawbacks?

I did some file transfer tests and with a 3.7 GB video file and Fancy Cache took 3 seconds off the time it took to transfer it from my Lacie Raid 0 drive to a backup drive. I do not consider this a worthwhile increase in performance considering that Fancy Cache blue screen'd my Win 7 x64 desktop just hours later.

 

[whs]

I guess we can bury this idea. It's not easy to get a performance boost for cheap. LOL