Following scenario:

I've got a media share with video, music, pdfs and so on. Lot of stuff. As I've discovered the incredible benefits of Navidrome I want to switch my music from the HDD array onto a SSD in order to save money on the power consumption. But I am restless on how to do it:

 

• Adding the SSD to the array would run into issues with TRIM operations and would be limited through the parity read/write spead anyways. Wouldn't matter that much though as it would be "only" music. 
• Adding it as an own music cache and backup it to the array via Backup plugin (would make most sense in a standard Unraid scenario IMHO)
• Adding it as an unassigned device and symlink it into the share?

 

What should happen is that instead on writing it on the HDD it would get written onto the SSD. But this would be also be hit with the parity drive limitation as well as being not protected by it. I stil would need to backup it AND it would always spin up the HDD in order when it gets read from the SSD I pressume? 

Or is this a suitable scenario?

I did change the location of my music a few months back, not really to save power but to have it more responsive when starting a new playlist.

In my case I just put it on my general SSD pool that does:

• appdata
• caching
• transcode tempdir
• music now

It was simpler for me and large enough (4x 500GB in RAID10).

 

The Pool is the best solution in my opinion. Now it would depend on your specific server details to decide if it is a separate pool or something more generic.

I run music on an unassigned device - same SSD I've used for years, just in a new server. I simply back it up to the main array to save myself time on what I'm sure will be the eventual required recovery to a new drive. At that point it'll likely head to a pool.