While it is a wonderful thing that SSD prices continue to drop, they have unfortunately not dropped fast enough for most people. Fortunately for everyone, RAM prices have dropped so low that many systems now contain copious amounts of RAM. But does it matter? Often not, unfortunately. For example, on systems with 4GB of RAM, most of the time that RAM is simply wasted in an unused state. In fact, RAM prices have dropped so low that it is possible to purchase 1,024MB of RAM for under $12 dollars. We remember when a single 64MB DIMM would cost $99. That was over ten years ago.But it still bothers many users that adding such large pools of RAM to a system just doesn’t improve system performance anymore. Ask any system administrator and they’ll tell you that any unused available RAM simply goes to waste.Ask any PC gamer and they’ll tell you that if you’re running Windows 7 and even if you’re playing the latest games DX11 games, there’s no benefit in having 8GB or 16GB; usually, you may as well just be running 4GB. There’s no good way to use RAM to improve PC game performance.That is, until now.Today at the government technology convention and trade show FOSE, Raxco Software begins putting your RAM to work for you. Whether your system has 2GB or 128GB of RAM or more, we’ll show users that you can experience levels of system performance previously unheard of.For example — check out some of these tests:

Without PerfectCache:OCZ Vertex 3, 120GB, 6Gbps

With PerfectCache: OCZ Vertex 3, 120GB, 6Gbps

What about real world results? We’re presenting organic test results for both physical and virtual environments at FOSE. For those that aren’t attending, to give you an idea of the power of PerfectCache, the following results from what we feel are the two leading professional benchmarking utilities should be of interest. These tests were performed by our senior product manager Erwin Solis.

First up, Erwin’s personal favorite: PassMark® Performance Test 7.0

Without PerfectCache

With PerfectCache

Next up, PCMARK 7® Professional, from Futuremark®.

3231 PCMarks

PCMARK7 — without PerfectCache

5182 PCMarks

PCMARK7 — with PerfectCache

I’m sure some will doubt the above results. That’s OK. We invite you to take PerfectCache for a test drive yourself.

One last thing — an SSD is not required to obtain the results shown. However, performance characteristics do differ a bit between SSDs and HDDs. In the above tests, an SSD was used for the CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 results. But for both the PassMark® Performance Test 7.0 and PCMARK® 7 Professional benchmarks, a single, non-RAID HDD was used. The specific model was a recertified Seagate® 500GB ST3500320AS. To get the best results from an HDD, the drive should be defragmented with plenty of consolidated free space using a utility such as PerfectDisk 12.

For those interested, the results with the Seagate® 500GB ST3500320AS after defragmentation with PerfectDisk 12 are below. In both instances, OptiWrite was enabled. Clearly, an SSD will return higher results on most metrics, but at theses speeds, the differences are negligible.

We expect that many users will be interested in using PerfectCache™ in combination with PerfectDisk™ 12 in place of an expensive SSD upgrade. When used with a standard HDD, PerfectCache will provide better than SSD performance without any of the drawbacks. No need to worry about SSD life cycles, wear leveling or write amplification because PerfectCache uses your system RAM. There is also no need to make compromises on the size of your storage. If you already own an SSD, PerfectCache can be used to either accelerate it, or to accelerate any secondary HDD storage.

Without PerfectCache: Seagate® 500GB ST3500320AS

With PerfectCache: Seagate® 500GB ST3500320AS

Automatic caching to improve PC and server performance is here.

Welcome to PerfectCache. Available for your  PCs. Available for your servers.