befuddled

[bwana]

I know what a ram disk is. I put my temp folders there, etc. Does fancy cache use ramdisks? How do you tell fancy cache to use a ramdisk? Without a ramdisk, where does fancy cache put its cache? The diagram on the ho,e page makes it look like ram talks to fancy cache. But the data flowing into fancycache comes from a hard disk.

Without a ramdisk, is the 'only' benefit of fancycache the fact that it 'caches better' than the OS?
What makes the computer more responsive-fancycache or the ramdisk? Or is their existence synergistic so the benefit is greater than the sum of the individual benefits?

Sorry for these basic questions- google gives information but not understanding. I thought that some of you might have the answers handy.

[support]

FancyCache don't use ramdisks. It allocates the memory from the system (as ramdisks) and use these memory to cache data.

[bwana]

but in the fancycache prefs, isnt there a place where you select the hard drive? is that
1)where fancy cache draws storage to be used as cache?

Or is that
2)the target that fancycache intercepts read/write requests to?

If the case is #1, then you should always select a ramdisk. (That's the best thing to be used as cache)
If the case is #2, it makes no sense to select a ramdisk (Why cache read/write requests to a ramdisk?)

[RAMbo]

Nothing is a fast a RAMdisk. But that's about the only advantage of a RAMdisk

A RAMdisk is usally small. FancyCache can easily work with several 3TB harddisks. To do so it only uses a few MB of cache.
So FancyCache uses, say, 50MB to improve the performance of 5TB harddisk space.

FancyCache is as your wrote a smart cache system.
It tries to minimize the number or read/write actions to HD.
It has little use if you read/write a big file to harddisk.
But quite often several programs are accessing your harddisk and/or small blocks are written to HD.
FancyCache tries to organize data requests in such a way the disks are accessed in such a way the harddisks work fastest.
Example: Writing 100 blocks of 4KB is much slower than writing 1 block of 400KB.

I think you should/could just try it and see if it works for you. It's no RAMdisk replacement so you can use both.
Things like this depend greatly on the speed of your harddisks and usage of your PC.
Just like a quad-core PC with a 100MB is useless for someone that only emails with his/her PC.
But for others it's worth every cent.

That's my 2 cents