ah my old safe space acquaintance is still here

if you talk about ramcache i would say no, it actually uses a small part of your ram memory and uses that to cache all the drives on your system in a intelligent way ;)

almost straight from the folder

RAMCACHE III
RAMCache lll software turns milliseconds into microseconds to boost game-load times. Fully compatible with the latest NVM Express® storage options, its uniquely intelligent technology effectively caches an entire storage device so that favorite games and apps launch at breakneck speeds. The intuitive interface displays real-time drive information, such as current read/write speeds and health status, and a Smart mode automatically caches all storage devices to maximize system resources.

It is not possible to cache entire storage device , HDD 3tb data ram 32gb , not possible.

I'm not sure how Rog Strix perceive this, this is the text from the motherboard page

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/ROG-STRIX-B460-H-GAMING/

scroll down untill you see ram cache outlined, click on it and voila this text will appear

smart mode automatically caches all storage drives to maximize system resources

There's nothing available that will come close to the speed of RAM, so it's worth double/triple-checking this - you can get screw sets of varying sophistication (this one should be as high-end as you need to go) to get access to your laptop memory. It's quite likely that there are now SO-DIMM modules with higher capacity than when your laptop was manufactured, so even if you are at a specified maximum, you may be able to exceed that.

The only other option (aside from pagefile on SSD) is a new system (laptop or desktop). Even if you have an ExpressCard slot (which is likely to be the fastest connection available) there doesn't seem to be anything in terms of RAM expansion available.
Apologies - ReadyBoost is the term I should have used. From what I've read online, it only provided a benefit for systems with 512MB RAM or less, so I doubt it would benefit you much - even if you did have a fast thumb drive.

Any particular technical reason why you would consider XP's caching sub-par?
I think the privacy and disk wear aspects (particularly for SSDs) have been mentioned. One potential gotcha is that RAMdisks tend to be small in size, so more likely to run out of space (browser caching is probably not going to reach the gigabyte range but the Temp folder in Windows certainly can if you are handling large multi-GB compressed archives). Romex's Ramdisk has a hybrid disk option where the first part of the disk uses RAM and if that fills up, the rest goes to a file on disk. Performance obviously drops at that point, but it avoids premature disk-full errors.

What that means is if you have 2-3 HDD's, then it will try and cache the most recently used data without being limited to one drive. It does not mean that the whole of your HDD will be cached or pre-loaded. As Orkhepaj said, that's literally not possible to fit TeraByte's of data into 2 Gigabyte RAM. It's just marketing speak.

ReadyBoost was designed more for general usage where if a USB stick had slightly higher random read + writes than a mechanical HDD, then the OS would try and intelligently use it as a 2nd cache just for that stuff. It's still going to stutter like crazy though vs newer "heavyweight" games. And ReadyBoost was mostly created prior to SSD's taking off in popularity. If you can upgrade from HDD to SSD, it's definitely worth it.

I don't know what you mean by "sealed with screws" but assuming it's a laptop, sometimes you can find "Service Manuals" for many models that go into a lot more detail about disassembly & replacing usually non-accessible components than normal User Manuals do. I did that on a relative's laptop (where HP went from having neat user-accessible compartments on old models to obtusely hiding it underneath the keyboard with no access on newer ones). It took a bit of disassembly + reassembly work, but with the help of a Service Manual it did actually work. I wouldn't even bother trying with using pagefiles / ReadyBoost onto USB sticks to mimic RAM if you can find a way to upgrade your actual RAM.

Windows XP doesn't aggressively cache disk reads the way Linux does. In particular, Linux uses as much memory as it can to cache disk reads so that it doesn't have to keep reading from disk, whereas Windows XP does not, leaving lots of RAM completely unused (and hence wasted). So I can say that, at the time Windows XP was popular, it was years behind Linux in this respect.

Windows Vista, I believe, changed this; it now uses extra ram to cache disk reads in a manner similar to Linux; this behavior has been carried over to later versions of Windows as well.


Linux's tmpfs filesystem can be seen as sort of a hybrid approach as well. Files in tmpfs are normally stored in the filesystem cache, but it's possible for them to be evicted and swapped to the swap partition/file if the RAM is needed for something else.

One way in which tmpfs differs from a conventional ramdisk is that it's not a block device on which a filesystem is stored; it's an actual filesystem. Another is that it will only use as much RAM as the files currently on it; it doesn't need to reserve capacity ahead of time, and the RAM is freed as soon as the files are deleted. (I believe AmigaOS actually has a similar ram filesystem, though I believe it doesn't do the swap to disk thing.)

(Before you ask, no you can't put a swap file on a tmpfs filesystem; the kernel won't allow it. If you use the loop device (allows you to treat a file as a block device) to work around this restriction, expect a deadlock once the system tries to actually use that swap space.)

If by "aggressive caching" you mean reading in data from disk before any request has been made to access it, then yes XP doesn't do that.

But I'd argue that is a good thing.

Bear in mind that caching data only provides a benefit if that data is accessed more than once. If the data is accessed once only, you have an (arguably small) performance loss since you've (a) spent time on the initial data read; (b) spent time checking cache indexes for that data and then retrieving it and (c) used memory to hold that data when it could have been put to other use (more of an opportunity cost). Without caching, you incur overhead (a) only.

So to get a performance benefit, cached data needs to be accessed twice or more.

With "aggressive caching", there's a good chance that you will have cached data that is never subsequently accessed. Even if the OS caching routine is able to perfectly predict your data requests you will, at best, equal the performance gain of standard caching (there may be an appearance of a performance gain, since the initial data read from disk may happen during idle time or when you otherwise don't notice, but empirically the increased overhead of excessive caching still exists).

A more legitimate criticism of XP's caching in my view is lack of user control - you can't set the amount of caching and you can't restrict it by volume (so ramdisks get cached, a "well-duh" decision if ever there was one).
Interesting info on tmpfs - is that subject to any caching?

tmpfs *is* cached; in fact, the copy in cache is the only copy of the data; it's just that it's never written to disk unless it needs to be swapped out.

One can look at the simpler ramfs, which differs from tmpfs in that it never writes the files to disk, and as a result the files are always in ram. In the case of ramfs, files stored there are saved in the cache, and (here's the important part) the cache is the *only* place the files are stored. In essence, ramfs *is* the disk cache (or part of it); the files are cached, but never actually written anywhere.

(Note that the use of tmpfs is preferred; there's no way to limit the size of ramfs, and the ram it uses can't be swapped out, so if it's heavily used, the OOM killer will start killing important processes; after too much use, you could get to the point where ramfs is taking too much RAM and the only process that the OOM killer sees is init, which it can't kill (or else the kernel will panic), so it has no choice but to panic.)

(By the way, a swap file in ramfs doesn't have the same issue as one in tmpfs; the kernel will not let you do this unless you use the loop device workaround, but at least you don't risk deadlock here. On the other hand, there isn't much point in putting a swap file in RAM.)

as long as it does what it says it does i'm good and so far it does seem to do the trick..... i do understand that caching an entire drive seems to be a bit of a marketing trick when spoken like that but in the end it is effectively doin just that right?

i'm surprised that there are so many nay sayers right from the start concerning this product....

though i myself did try increasing page files earlier on, previous builds, without any visible effect so maybe that's that

The typical two cache mechanisms are Most Frequently Used / Last Accessed files. So if you play a small game over & over, day after day (eg, Stardew Valley) then assuming the game is smaller than your cache size, it'll probably be cached & pre-loaded. But when you change game though, the new game won't be pre-cached and load times will be no different vs loading directly off the SSD until the cache program gets "retrained". If you play a series of different games, it probably won't work well at all. All "Most Frequently Used" caches do is predict you'll load the same thing today that you did yesterday. And all "Last Accessed" caches do it unnecessarily duplicate what the Windows File Cache does anyway.

Same goes for larger games, eg, if you install a 20GB game with a 2GB cache you're barely going to be caching 1/10th of the game, eg, Level 1 of 10. And by the time it "knows" to cache Level 1 via being "frequently accessed files", you'll be playing Level 2 and will no longer need those files. For linear FPS's where you don't return to the same areas (eg, Bioshock Infinite or Dishonored), you won't see much difference at all as by the time something gets cached, you'll have moved past the need to reload it. And the cache itself doesn't "know" or understand the concept of levels, it only sees files / sectors and won't have pre-cached anything that you haven't already loaded. And if you do return to the same area in an open world game, then recently accessed files will be in RAM anyway via the Windows File Cache. This is already seen with rapidly using the "coc" teleport command in Morrowind / Oblivion loading visited areas much faster even without a special RamCache because they're still sitting in the "RAMCache" that is the Windows File Cache.

RAMDisks / RAMCache programs have their use, but for many games they are extremely limited. And there's always the paradox that such caches work less well on the larger games that need the most caching, and at the same time caches work best on very small games you play over & over that already load fairly quickly anyway.

I'm not a "naysayer" out of ignorance, I have actually tested this stuff myself and found it simply isn't worth the trouble vs getting a large decent SSD. As mentioned earlier my MX500 has a 2GB DRAM cache inside it, and will be caching a lot of files that RAM Cache will be caching anyway. Add on what's being cached with the Windows File Cache, and there's so much overlap trying to force a 3rd cache layer that instead of over-spending on RAM, you're better off just buying the next size up SSD simply because games are getting bigger faster than the average RAM requirement is going up.

not so sure about the overspending though, i'm not into the 64 gb business with my system, it just so happenend i was curious about the software and the experience of others, its free, it does seem to improve speeds for some games on all of my drives and you literally don't have anything to do with it.... not to speak that it is designed to work with the fastest nvem drives out there, what is not to like ??

i'm talking about 4x games, total war etc ... not honey dew valley

I really don't know what else to say. You're asking for people's experience and I simply shared mine. If you think it makes a difference to you then leave it enabled. "This special ASUS RAMCache is designed to work with the fastest nvem drives out there" though seems a rather backwards marketing claim by ASUS as RAM caches will see the most benefit when caching reads from the slowest drives, as the HDD -> SATA SSD -> NVMe SSD -> RAMDrive shows depreciating gains per jump vs real-world game-load times. I mean, that's kinda why no-one bothers "caching a cache".

that much is true, i probably lost track somewhere of my initial goal

at least let me thank you for your patience and time