I have a 9 HDD drive array formatted for ZFS, drives are not all the same size and I do have two parity drives. I want to be able to easily expand array as needed. Data isn’t that important but the hours I have into ripping 4K Blu-ray movies I’d rather not repeat. When I move a 60GB file I see about a 50MB write speed. I would like some kind of write cache or drive pool that can move data a lot faster albeit temporarily, then let it write to my array. I want the file to end up in my data/media/movies folder. I have a SSD I use for “cache” but don’t want to wear it out moving 60 GB movie files. Drives wouldn’t need to be very big, just not sure how I would move data. I have room for more drives I could add two striped HDD, but how do I get data from pool to correct spot automatically. Array has no issue streaming movies but the hour+ to move a file is not ideal. I checked and write cache is enabled on all drives. I have options for 2 optane or 2 NVME drives or combination if I can get something that will endure the writes. I see enterprise grade SSD drives on serverparts.com, not expensive in smaller sizes. Again how do I move them automatically? Can I get mover to do that for me even  if I have a cache drive already for plex data to speed up that process? 

Edited February 21, 20251 yr by Christopher_2

You can set a share to use a pool as primary storage, any new data for that share will be written there and then moved by the mover, and it will maintain the folder structure.

If you need to transfer more at one time than cache can hold, don't cache 

 

If you do initial data load without parity it will be much faster, then you can build parity after initial load. 

 

Turbo write when you are writing with parity will be somewhat faster. 

 

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/storage-management/#array-write-modes

2 hours ago, trurl said:

If you need to transfer more at one time than cache can hold, don't cache 

 

If you do initial data load without parity it will be much faster, then you can build parity after initial load. 

 

Turbo write when you are writing with parity will be somewhat faster. 

 

https://docs.unraid.net/unraid-os/manual/storage-management/#array-write-modes

I did try turbo write, it was marginally faster, looking for more like this is going to take 10 minutes and not an hour.

 

3 hours ago, JorgeB said:

You can set a share to use a pool as primary storage, any new data for that share will be written there and then moved by the mover, and it will maintain the folder structure.

 

Would this be similar to cache ? Except I would use a pool as primary then use mover to move from pool to array?

 

 

Edited February 21, 20251 yr by Christopher_2

Yes, you can have any pool as the primary storage for one or more shares, then any data there gets moved by the mover, to the array or even to another pool if that's what you want.

43 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Yes, you can have any pool as the primary storage for one or more shares, then any data there gets moved by the mover, to the array or even to another pool if that's what you want.

Just for fun and to experiment I went on Amazon and found barebones HP 250GB SSD drives that deliver next day. Going to put 4 in ZFS pool to learn, since I’ve never used one and see what happens. Hopefully not writing to a single drive will make them last a bit longer.

4 SSD raid 0 cache pool did help, however they were only part of the solution all together. Used an old 250GB WD blue NVME drive externally in a USB 3.2 enclosure on Windows 11, and can now max out my 2.5Gb network speed. Would have to replace network gear with 10g parts on laptop, switch and unraid card, to speed it up now.