What can I use my cache drives for?

Hey community, looking for some insight.

I have my server set-up with 2 HDDs, 2 more on the way, for the main array. And that is all that I will need for the time being

I got 2 2TB Solidigm P44 Pro NVMes I'm going to use as a raid1 for my appdata/system/domains cache (prefer mode).

I also have 2 1TB SSD I plan to use for the array cache (yes mode).

However, I still have 2 available NVMe slots and 2 extra Sata connectors.

One thing to consider is that the 2 remaining NVMe slots are one connected to the CPU and the other through the chipset, though both are PCIE 4.0 x4, but I'm not sure if setting them as a raid 1 will introduce issues because of the different latency they may have. So maybe I'm left with a Raid1 an 2 individual drives.

Considering this is going to be exlusively a media streaming server, with plex, arr stack and the likes. Might throw in a nextcloud there also. I will at most have 2 VMs (1 windows, 1 linux) with light use.

Is there anything else I could use those available slots for to further improve the experience? Or I should be good enough with what I have?

While learning how to use cache I came accross suggestions of splitting docker and VM images in different cache pools or having a separate cache for the Plex db\library\thumbnails. Also read people putting their nextcloud files directly in a protected cache pool.

I'm still doing my initial configs though, so it is not like I bottlenecked somewhere. I just wanted to see whats out there.

Thnaks in advance

Edited July 13, 20241 yr by tomasfd