I’m having problems with a ReadyCache that I’ve installed a few days ago. I’ve experienced this twice now, with a manual “Clear Cache” in between.
First everything seems alright and the cache slowly fills up and after a few reboots I can see in the Cache Monitor that booting is lightning fast and that all frequently used apps are loaded from the cache. So far, so good. But then the problems start…
It seems that as soon as the cache partition is filled up, things are going wrong. First some of the cache *say 30% to 50%) is freed and then filled up again, according to the GUI bar. This is just about explainable by some garbage collection algorithm combined with the learning algorithm that maybe doesn’t have sufficient information yet.
Then, suddenly, *all* of the cache gets deleted and then filled again. Then the same thing happens again. And again. And again. Across reboots. Nothing seems to fix it. The machine is quite slow again, so whatever it might be caching it certainly isn’t what matters.
According to SanDisk SSD Toolkit I’m at about 3 Billion LBA sectors (= 1.5 TB) written now with only about 200 Million (= 100 GB) read, after 44 power on hours. While writing this forum post it had written another 20 GB to the SSD. That is clearly wrong. At that rate the drive is dead within the year.
This is a fairly standard Windows 7 64-bit desktop machine. There is no obvious background process activiity going on that might explain it. Even if the software wasn’t sure yet what to cache it still shouldn’t exhibit the behaviour that it does.
Any suggestions on what is going on here? Hurt me plenty with technobabble, I’m an IT pro.
I am also experiencing problems with ReadyCache where the cache will sometimes retain its cache upon the next reboot or two but then lose it on another. I am using Windows 8 Pro 64-bit myself with all relatively new hardware from just a few months ago.
I have tried several things to make it work from reinstalling the program, to changing the compatibility settings, to changing ports and I can’t explain it either.
It is a real shame because when it does work, it works quite well and for a fairly low cost.
I would hope Sandisk or even another user can figure out this problem for us because I know that we are not the only ones!
Update: First I’ve tried clearing the cache which didn’t do anything. It still wouldn’t work.
Then as a last resort I tried the trusted Windows method of doing this: I’ve deinstall and reinstalled the software. I also deleted the ExpressCache partition on the SSD so that it had to be recreated by the software.
After 5 days I can say with some confidence that this actually seems to have done the trick. The software is behaving now and is caching as it should. Of course my expectation was that this thing is plug and play but in reality it probably cost me about 10 hours of my time to get it to work as it should. I will keep that in mind for future purchases from SanDisk.
After the software update on Friday the cache was cleared once again but was re-populated without two hours or so.
These two things tell me that “clearing the cache” really just means clearing the cache. It does not mean clearing the metadata, which I implied it would because the way it is done doesn’t make any sense to. If you really want to clear the cache the you have to remove the software and delete the partition it seems.
I also don’t know why my meta-data got so garbled in the first place that it confused the hell out of the software. I certainly didn’t do anything out of the ordinary. The only potential explanations I have are the Windows indexing service and MS Security Essentials, both of which I have toned down now.
Calling it an “issue” when the product cannot perform its main function due to shoddy software is a bit of a euphemism, don’t you think. Especially when it concerns storage, which is probably the most important IT subject of them all. I think I shall stay away from SanDisk in my professional capacity.
I too have experienced this issue pretty much since I got this in October. Still trying to resolve this with SanDisk Support. This has happened on Windows 7 pro 64 bit and Windows 8 pro 64 bit. It still resets itself sporadically even after the rebuild to Windows 8, but does work well until this happens. Seemed to be stable (but really unsure as it was only a couple fo days) until I reinstalled SQL Server. Anybody else running sql server and getting this issue?
once you reboot and the cache has reset in the cache monitor can you ope the command prompt and type the following command
eccmd -info
what I would like to see here is if the cache say 0% or if there is cache present. It is possible this is a GUI bug and the cache is not actually being reset.
As you can see my LBA written (F1) count is nearly equal to yours but I got a little higher power hours count. Still amazing that there is nearly the same amount of data written and read.
Good job i can understand a bit of german, but it still does not solve the “issue” i currently have the SSD connected to a Sata 3 card and i am thinking about trying the onboard sata 2 (might work). As sandisk are not getting back to me i will try.
As for the aggressive cache I will find it difficult to re amend the algorithm, it encrypted LOL.
But I must confirm for SanDisk, when it works it makes a good difference to an ageing system
If you’re using something like a Marvell 91XX controller, random r/w access and latency should improve in the SB ports, these being more handy for cache (despite lower sequencial max speeds on SATA2).
Good it’s not just me. After around 6 months of flawless performance my expresscache drive is now flushing all the data after every 1-3 boots. Ive done most of the same things as stated in the other posts, keep checking for updated software but have been unable to solve the problem.
Maybe these drives just have a short life. I know when it will flush the data, it freezes during boot for 10-20 seconds then the hard drive starts running like crazy. Leading me to believe it’s unable to read the expresscache drive and after failing a number of time it resorts back to the hdd and resets the sdd in order to try to fix it.
Now I traded one problem for another. I got rid of the cache clearing every few reboots but now it pops up everyboot saying this program wants to make changes to my computer, Yes or No ?
After reading around I saw there was a bug in 1.1.0 that prevented the software from finding any updates, even though it said I had the current version there was a newer version for download. So I updated to version 1.2.0, now it no longer clears the drive but gives up that pop up message at each boot.
That was by design in this version. The GUI is set to load on every startup. This is going to be changed in the next release so you can disable running the GUI at start up. Until then you can set UAC (user account control) to never notify and you will not see that message from windows asking you if you want to run the GUI.
