Chronos 7 - No active time for Disk 1 - SanDisk SSD i100 8GB

So I have the Samsung Chronos 7 here in the UK. I use it for software development.

During builds (and frankly most of the rest of the time too) the Windows 8 task manager shows Disk 0 (C as 100% active.
However Disk 1 - SanDisk SSD i100 8GB never, ever, ever shows any active time or read/write speed or response times.

Is this normal? Should there be any reported activity from this "Disk" or not?
Is this because its the express cache and should just be ignored even though Windows (Tabl)8 picks it up thinking its a disk drive it needs to report on?

 

Hi Loki, welcome to the forum.

I gather that you have an earlier Series 7 model (2012 or even 2011, and one of the numerous sizes) since the newer ones (2013) don't have ExpressCache anymore.

The 8GB SanDisk SSD i100 is just a small SSD soldered on the motherboard (hence iSSD), and it's visible to any disk management tool in any OS. It only becomes a cache by means of the ExpressCache software, which uses it to hold frequently read files (actually LBAs, sector blocks) on the HDD.

ExpressCache puts its own partition on the iSSD so it doesn't have a drive letter. But if you uninstall ExpressCache, you can create a regular NTFS partition instead.

You can check whether ExpressCache is working properly by using ECCmd, as described in the following thread -- which also contains a ton more discussion about ExpressCache:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sam...ache-i-want-my-expresscache-back-edition.html

I wouldn't expect ExpressCache to be very active during building. Your compiler's program files are probably cached, but not the source nor any of the temp files produced during the process. Caching those would only slow down disk access. Maybe header files and other frequently read static source files are cached.

 

Yeah, NP700Z5C I think

Ok yeah that seemed to indicate it was working (although now I've done something and its showing all zeros, I think that will fix itself after reboot).

One question though, I noticed the ExpressCache Driver seemed to be using a gig of RAM as well. Is that normal?

 

I don't see that on mine (Win8, ExpressCache version 1.0.94). ExpressCache hovers around 9MB RAM usage. I suppose it is possible that it uses RAM for additional caching under certain conditions. Or maybe while it is populating your cache. Does it release the RAM or hold on to it if you try to allocate it from other apps?

Try this: Clean out your disk (Disk Cleanup or CCleaner), defrag your drive, then run BOOTOPT.BAT in the ExpressCache folder. It should take some time, otherwise something is wrong. Let is finish all disk activity. Now reboot and see if your ExpressCache behaves.

Again, much more discussion and advice in the ExpressCache thread I linked.

 

I'll try your suggestions over the weekend but yeah, it was holding that gig constantly. The system was running out of resources during heavy load. Having 1/8th of your memory being used up by an SSD thats suppose to make things faster doesn't seem ideal to me! Whatever I did to ExpressCache to stop it working (haven't rebooted yet) has also released that memory..