Processes are disclosed for decreasing contention in caches in order to increase the efficiency of multi-threaded or multi-processor systems. By using multiple locks in a cache, smaller portions of the cache can be locked during cache updates (e.g., during a data update or a storage block eviction). As only small portions of the cache are locked at any given time, contention between threads, particularly in multi-processor implementations, will likely be reduced. For example, if different threads are trying to update different entries in the cache, the threads can proceed with updating the cache concurrently.