Crad Posted January 13, 2021 Share Posted January 13, 2021 (edited) Hey all, I think this will become a common and fundamental question for a lot of users once Unraid 6.9 is out in full. Given 2 NVME drives, what are the benefits and draw backs of choosing 2 separate pools vs 1 combined pool (with no raid redundancy, just raw storage space). --- My personal scenario: I needed more cache storage for my VM to process some images so I grabbed another NVME drive. Now I'm tossing up between keeping the drives in separate cache pools for the VM to have dedicated access to one, or combine them into a single cache to benefit from the total storage space. Obviously choosing multiple cache pools at the time of writing would require an upgrade to 6.9 RC. For more info my current cache is a 1TB Samsung Evo 960 and the new NVME is a 2TB Sabrent Rocket 4 (pcie 4.0). So the benefits of a combined pool will mean I could use up to 3TB on cache. --- As far as I can tell, the only downside to using a combined, single cache pool is the IO interference with Dockers. But is that it? Anyone have any thoughts on this? EDIT: Also I guess it might be valuable for some people to know why you might or might not choose to set it up as an unassigned device instead of 2nd cache pool. Edited January 13, 2021 by Conrad Allan Quote Link to comment
itimpi Posted January 13, 2021 Share Posted January 13, 2021 6 hours ago, Conrad Allan said: EDIT: Also I guess it might be valuable for some people to know why you might or might not choose to set it up as an unassigned device instead of 2nd cache pool. I think there will be few cases where using UD is better when using Unraid 6.9.0. It was normally done so that you could dedicate device(s) to a particular usage type but with multiple cache pools you can do this anyway The only remaining use case I can see is when you want to be able to easily unplug the device and not have it online all the time - something that is not practical with a pool. Quote Link to comment
Crad Posted January 13, 2021 Author Share Posted January 13, 2021 Yeah agreed, or potentially if the Mover is interfering with your 2nd cache pool for some reason, but it shouldn't do so if you don't have anything on there for the mover to action on. Got any thoughts on multiple cache pools vs one combined? Quote Link to comment
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