I have had my SanDisk ReadyCache SSD now for about a week and so far have not seen any improvement to my boot up times, or programs loading. In fact the PC running Windows 7 is the same as before I installed the device. The cache monitor works which is telling me that I have 14GB stored, I can see that a partition has been created and I do not have any warning signs appearing. I should point out that the ExpressCache symbol takes about three minutes to appear in the task bar after the other symbols have loaded.
All seems to be correct and working but so far I have not seen any improvement to the general acceleration of programs loading. Do I have to wait until the storage fills to 30GB? Any answers will be much appreciated.
You should already be seeing the performance boost. That said the performance boost you will get depends on your host computer. Is your host SATA 6Gb? If the SSD is connected to a SATA 3Gb or SATA 1.5Gb port the performance boost will be less noticeable.
What are the specs of your PC?
You can also download a program called bootracer. Once you have it installed disable the cache and run bootracer. This will reboot your PC and time it. This will give you a baseline of your PC performance. Then enable the cache and run it again. You should see a shorter boot time with cache enabled.
First of all, thank you for coming back to me so promptly, it is appreciated.
At your request, I downloaded BootTracer and booted the PC about ten times with the Sandisk ReadyCache enabled and ten times with it disabled. All the times varied by a few seconds here and there but the was NO discernible difference between enabled/disabled. The average time to Desktop was about 48 seconds.
My PC specs are: Motherboard Intel D915GEV, Pentium 4 3.0Ghz, ATI Radeon HD 3400, Western Digital WD1600 AAJS (160Gb 3.0Gbps) 3 .0 Gig memory
Running Windows 7.0 Pro 32 bit
I have another PC with a Corsair 60GB cache accelerator and that baby flies! Not so with the Sandisk, or not yet anyway!
Regards, Scanty
PS As I stated in the previous letter, the ExpressCache takes about three minutes to load - is this normal?
Just looking the specs of your MB up and it looks like you only have SATA 1.5Gb ports. This means the fastest speed you can get will be 150MB/s. The SSD will only perform as fast as the host allows. You will not see much of a performance boost if any at all on that PC since your HDD probably just about maxes that interface out anyway. In order to see the benefit you really need to have a PC with SATA 6Gb ports.
The biggest improvement comes from the reduced or rather non-existent seek times of the SSD and not the linear read transfer rate. Even with a 1.5Gb SATA port you should see a massively improved performance at boot and especially login. You should see that after 5 reboots at most. If you don’t then the product doesn’t work as advertised.
I’m sorry but that doesn’t make sense. If it isn’t a high performance SSD (which it isn’t) then it doesn’t matter whether it’s on 1.5Gb or higher. Therefore either you see an improvement when it’s on 1.5Gb or you would never see an improvement.
Also, I was talking about seek times, and compared to HDDs every SSDs is high performance when it comes to those. And seek times are what matters in most situations. Who does significantly large linear reads? Nobody, at least not on a desktop machine.
Why do I even bother debating technical details with first level support I wonder.
