So I have been playing with Unraid as a trial with some old 1TB drives I had laying around. I've pulled the trigger and bought 2 x 6TB iron wolf drives and 2 x Crucial SSDs. My question is what would be the best way to set these up?

Obviously the to HDDs will be parity and storage, but the SSDs have me wondering. Do I use 1 for cache and leave 1 unassigned for docker and VMs? Or can I add both and use the cache as storage for the VMs/Docker containers? Is there a "preferred" method?

Edited June 16, 20215 yr by IamDan

2 hours ago, IamDan said:

So I have been playing with Unraid as a trial with some old 1TB drives I had laying around. I've pulled the trigger and bought 2 x 6TB iron wolf drives and 2 x Crucial SSDs. My question is what would be the best way to set these up?

Obviously the to HDDs will be parity and storage, but the SSDs have me wondering. Do I use 1 for cache and leave 1 unassigned for docker and VMs? Or can I add both and use the cache as storage for the VMs/Docker containers? Is there a "preferred" method?

either method will work for the SSD’s.    If you want redundancy then use them as a single pool (albeit with only half the space) set up with the (default) of BTRFS RAID1.  If you are going to run without redundancy then running them as separate pools makes some sense.

3 hours ago, itimpi said:

either method will work for the SSD’s.    If you want redundancy then use them as a single pool (albeit with only half the space) set up with the (default) of BTRFS RAID1.  If you are going to run without redundancy then running them as separate pools makes some sense.

Can I use the pool for running docker containers and VMs?

I myelf am running a 2xSSD Raid1 pool as Cache for my shares, as well as dockers and (not performance-sensitive) VMs.

 

I've got a NVME in a second pool for my Gaming VM.

 

So far, all the Dockers and multiple VMs on the shared mirrored pool have a good to great performance.

Thanks guys!