I've read Tom's post about how the cache drive works.  What I want to know is what are the benfits besides write speed.  I use unraid to serve movies, music, and photos to my xboxes around the house.  Write speed isn't a big deal to me since nothing I do takes more than a few minutes.

the only other advantage I can for see is when you do writes, only 1 drive spins up. Sort of a queue.

This keeps the parity or any other drives spun down until later on when the cache/queue is emptied.

 

Another use is if you have static data and programs that you want to keep close to the system in a hidden directory.

I.E. you could install packages, database or a swap file on the cache drive and any writes do not involve parity.

Of course they have to be in a hidden directory.