I am building my first unraid setup, and I am confused on how the cache drive works in conjunction with the main data store and mappings.

 

in the larger corporate setups I hat at work, we have SSD cache drives at the head of some of our larger arrays, and their existence is transparent,  once the data in on the cache drive it appears to be in the main datastore, but that doesn't seem to be the same with unraid,  (ie: I copy a file to the nfs mount, and the data is sent to the cache drive, and the at some point of low system load it is copied to the disk array. )  however with unraid it seems that I have two mount points, and once a day the cache drive dumps to the main datastore.

 

The main use of this unraid will be media storage.  I would like to point my htpc at the array, but also have data on the cache drive be available for viewing as well.  not being an xbmc expert  it looks like I would have to create two sources  one for each and look in both for what I want based on it's age.

 

if I am missing a configuration detail please help me out.

 

also I installed the ssh addin via unmenu  but it doesn't allow root to ssh in,  if I create a user and set up sudo it works fine, but isn't persistent after a reboot.

You are definately missing something.  On your network, you are likely looking at the disk shares and not the user shares. Each user share has the option to use the cache drive. When set to Yes, the data is transparently copied first to the cache and then moved to the array. It will appear in the user share the whole time. The user shares will appear something like \\Tower\Movies on the network and a disk share will be \\Tower\disk1.