Hi all,

 

My QNAP motherboard failed recently so I'm looking for a new NAS setup and it looks like I'll be going down the Unraid route using some old hardware I have laying around. One of the things I found annoying with the QNAP was that when using docker I couldn't find a combination of settings that would allowed the hard drives to spin down when they weren't in use which was particularly annoying because it was in my office/spare room so I just accepted the noise when I was working and shut it down when we had guests.

 

While researching unraid the concept of cache pools has come up quite a lot and it sounds like this could help my solve the problem of a noisy nas but just wanted to get some sanity checking done before taking the leap (also need to wait til payday....)!

My current plan is to move over the 3x8tb drives from the qnap to the unraid server to create the main array (raid 5 unraid equivalent) and add 2x2tb sata ssd (raid 1 unraid equivalent) as a cache pool and using mover tuner plugin set it to run once a week and move data off the cache pool after it is 14 days old. This way, the drives should only have to spin up once a week, when I need to read something older than 2 weeks (not very common), or if the cache gets full which I think is unlikely as I only expect 1-200gb to be added to the nas per week.

 

Am I right in thinking this would work? Or is it a stupid idea and I need to rethink? My main priority is noise but a close second is power consumption as energy prices are very high here atm.

 

Thanks in advance,

Mike

Set the "default shares" cache:prefer (or only) so these will stay on cache. That will give better Docker/VM performance, and not keep array disks spinning since these files are always open.

 

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Shares#Default_Shares

 

https://wiki.unraid.net/Manual/Shares#Use_Cache_.28and_Mover_Behavior_with_User_Shares.29