Sunday, May 13, 2007

Disk Cache

What is a disk cache? To my knowledge, it speeds up harddisk access by storing some of the locations of the recently loaded files into the system memory. Ever realised that no matter how much ram you add, you always seem to have not enough memory? Actually, the extra memory is being eaten up by the disk cache, which might be needed by some other applications.

I did some tests on the disk cache and I found that if you allocate too much space for the disk cache, your harddisk will actually slow down. Depending on systems, the ideal values will be from 6144 to 10240. I have tested this using many systems, even those that have only 32MB ram. It has never crashed the system.

I have not tested this on harddisks with internal buffers. Theoritically, I can reduce the amount of memory used... I won't know until I upgrade my present harddisk.

  1. To set the disk cache, edit the SYSTEM.INI file.
  2. Find the [vcache] entry
    Example:
    [vcache]
    MinFileCache=10240
    MaxFileCache=10240

Save the File and reboot the system...

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