Jojomatik

I'm not entirely sure if it works out like I want it to. But since I'd like to have fast storage for my VMs and maybe accessing large files over the 10G network my HDDs are (or might be in the future) not sufficiently fast. The caching functionality in Unraid is write only afaik. By moving data to some part (maybe a partition) of the SSD I could in theory use the write cache and at least get close to something one could call "manual read caching". From what I've read this is not a problem with 2 SSDs. One for the conventional caching and one as fast storage as an unassigned drive. I'm not sure why it shouldn't work on one SSD but neither am I sure on how to set it up.

So, do i need to move data to the HDD beforehand and back to the SSD afterwards or can I just assign it as a cache drive and keep the data on it?

Up until two days ago I was running unraid on one SSD only, as I didn't yet buy HDD's. Now I installed the two 4TB HDD's and assigned them to the array / as parity disk. I would like to use my SSD as a cache drive and ideally storage for VMs and some larger files I'm working on at the moment. 1. How can I move the SSD out of the array without loosing any data? (currently holds everything from VMs to some basic shares) 2. Can I and if yes, how do I have to configure the SSD to be cache drive and storage for VMs and some files? 3. How should I feel about the protectedness of the data on the SSD? I'm pretty sure its not protected by parity, is there any way I can more or less be safe to not loose any data, such as backing it up daily or weekly to the array? It's possible that I could find answers to questions 2 and 3, but I'm not sure if those would match my exact circumstances. With regard to question 1 I couldn't find any answers (only on drives without data on them). If you argue that 2 and 3 are duplicates, feel free to not answer them (or leave me a link), but I'd really like to see answers to Q 1. Thank you.