I just wanted to say thank you for the help up front.  I have ran an Unraid server for a long time but never messed with the cache.  I now want to use my 1tb cache drive and have followed the proper steps I believe.  I have the shares set to 1st drive cache 2nd drive array  then mover is cache --> array.  I also set the minimum share to 100GB and the cache drive to 100GB.  So even large 4k movies should be fine for the most part moving to the cache and then the array.  No matter what I have no activation on the cache drive and only see one of my arrays writing during the file transfers.  I am attaching a diagnostics print up of my server.  Thank younas-diagnostics-20241126-1047.zip in advance! 

3 minutes ago, lattimershotgun said:

I also set the minimum share to 100GB and the cache drive to 100GB.

Floor setting needs to be lower than cache size, or it will go directly to the array.

I am sorry if I am coming off as ignorant but I am not sure what you mean.  Do you mean the shares minimum needs to be smaller than the cache?  So I would set the shares to 50gb and the cache to 100gb and problem solved?

I thought you meant the cache size was 100GB, what is the share name you are writing to?

So the shares are 90gb some are 97.8gb because unraid set that way by default.  I set the minimum cache to 100gb.  If I try to drag a file over to movie folder or any of my other shares, it just goes directly to one of the array drives.   I was assuming maybe that diagnostics it would show. I have a hard time reading that.  

1 hour ago, lattimershotgun said:

I set the minimum cache to 100gb.

There's no floor set for the movies share, only for the pool, but it should still go to the cache pool first, how are you writing to the share? Over SMB?

Over Smb via windows network share drive.  And when I run home I’ll double check but I thought I set a minimum of 90gb on that share.  Is that different than a floor ?  

No it's the same, but according to the diags there's no floor, but like mentioned that won't be the reason why it's not writing to the pool.

Wondering if I should just clear everything out and redo the whole set up I’m trying to avoid doing that. I have a feeling there has to be some stupid setting. I’m not thinking of.  

so I went in and set the shares to 50gb for some reason they were at 0 like you said.  Not sure how but I reset them to 50 across the board and left the cache at 100gb and still the files write to one of the drives on the array instead of using the cache. 

Create a new test share, cache primary array secondary, everything else leave as default, and then type

 

touch /mnt/user/share_name/a

 

see where a was created

it went to disk four in the array.  It did not go to the cache. 

files are transcoded to the cache just fine during plex hardware transcoding.  So I am at a loss. 

Post new diags and the name of the new test share

here is the new diag.  I looked into share.cfg in the diag and it shows  shareCacheEnabled="no"  which means its not active correct?   nas-diagnostics-20241127-1358.zip

Edited November 27, 20241 yr by lattimershotgun

the new test share is called test share

I think I see the issue, edit /boot/config/share.cfg and change

 

shareCacheEnabled="no" to "yes"

 

Then reboot and retest.

Thank you so much that worked!  Once I saw that in the share config I figured something weird was happening.  The cache is working!  Thank you very much, this whole ordeal has sparked my old love of linux again and makes me want to get back into it.  I miss IT! haha take care!