Hello all - new to Unraid coming from Xpenology and Trunas Scale. 

I have have a few general question with the build that I could use some help with.

 

I have a 8 disk array with one parity and a samsung 1tb nvme drive as my cache drive.  I have my media backed up on my Trunas server ready to go into the Unraid array.  I also have 3 500 sata SSDs unassigned.

 

Q1. I should turn off the cache for the new media share until the 14tb are copied over so I dont hammer the nvme?

 

Q2. I was planning to put my plex app data on the sata SSD to free up the cache nvme. This server will not have a ton of eternal file transfers so the question is am I fine keeping my dockers on the cache drive and backed up to the array? I dont feel I will ever use all the space for cache. I would rather move any VMs to the Sata SSDs.

 

Q3. Should I used the Sata SSDs as unassigned or should I just make a second Cache pool?

 

Thank you in advance this journey has gone well so far I see myself purchasing Unraid this weekend after I test more.

 

CD

My 2cents:

Q1: Just set the cache setting to "no" for the long transfer. This will not put any file on the cache drive, so you do not need to free it up again later. There is no time saving expected with the cache because it will surely be overrun, the remaining files will be written directly to the disks anyway. And at the end, you have to run mover to free up the cache. In total it would be slower, so be clever, turn in off.

 

Q2: look at Q3 🙂

 

Q3: it is wise to create a cache "pool" for ANY SATA SSD. Why? simply because you can then select directly where shares store their files.

I used """ for pool because each pool just contains a single drive. To move the files you first set the Share (lets say "appdata" for dockers and so on) to "Prefer Pool3" (or the name that you have given the pool). Stop Dockers and VMs, run Mover. When finished set the Share to "Only Pool3" and restart those services. All files will be on the SSD you wanted and new files of this share will be created there. Do this with all shares that you like. ("Prefer..." tells the mover to move over as much files as possible to that "cache" drive, "only" tells it not to store anywhere else)

 

Unassigned devices are only useful for files that should not be publically accessable. They are mounted locally and no share is created for them. So usually this is not what you want.

But they are also useful in certain situations. I for instance have an unassigned device that is passed on to a Windows VM and formatted and used there.

Thank you for your reply and time. You cleared that up for me.