What are downsides if VM image being on SSD via unassigned devices?

[tmchow]

I’ve been running Home Assistant in a VM for years on my unraid server.  However, the disk image has always been on my array.  I didn’t think of this until recently, when I added a Win10 VM, and it was so slow to use.  After some research the clear culprit was the image being on the array.  I moved it to to an SSD that is connected in unassigned devices plugin.  As soon as I did that win10 QAS very responsive. 
 

Home Assistanr overall works fine with the image on the array, but ive found it a bit slow for many things like updates. Given my win10 experience it got me thinking whether I should also move this image to the SSD not in the array.  
 

Being on the array gives me the security of data protection that comes with the array but wondering the downsides of moving it to the ssd outside the array?

[Kilrah]

Just that, lack of protection.

That's why the standard way of using Unraid is having an SSD cache pool on which the VM images are and which you can set up as RAID1 for protection.

[tmchow]

On 2/1/2023 at 1:22 AM, Kilrah said:

Just that, lack of protection.

That's why the standard way of using Unraid is having an SSD cache pool on which the VM images are and which you can set up as RAID1 for protection.

my cache drives are in a cache pool actually.  So instead of putting the imagined on a single ssd connected with unassigned drives plug-in, sounds like I should put it on the cache pool?

[Kilrah]

Yes, it's the standard way to do it on unraid.

[tmchow]

2 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Yes, it's the standard way to do it on unraid.

so no issue with a VM on the cache drive causing too many writes to the SSD? Not sure if it’s something to worry about or not

[Kilrah]

Well pretty much every computer out there today runs its OS from an SSD, so...

Edited February 15, 2023 by Kilrah