The only real reason I'm getting a cache drive in the first palce is to install plugins, I am not overly concerned about boosting write speed. I would like to do this inexpensively and have been lookin at stepping down from a 128GB SSD to a 64GB.  My concern is from reading that this would limit my daily writes to say less than 60GB. While that is extremely rare its still possible maybe once or twice a year. In this event am I able to bypass the cache and write whatever I want?

you could write directly to say "//tower/disk5/media/bluray" is you needed to bypass the cache.

 

I leave my disk shares on, but hidden and secured.

So it should be incredibly easy and painless for the 1-2x a year it may come up? I had read most of the weekend about Esxi and its possible usefulness when it comes to my needs, but I don't think i want to drop the money on hardware such as yours when 99% of what I am doing is serving media and downloading content.

If you do not need to cache drive for write boost and only for plugins then why not use a regular drive and turn of the cache write boost functionality.

this is what I am doing.

Well that has been part of my delima here. I do not have a spare HDD laying around (didn't buy any new storeage over the past 10 years or so.) So I would have to buy a drive to install apps on, looks as though a 320-500GB HDD runs about $55-$65 which seems an unreasonable expense when ^$-128GB SSD drives can be had for $40-70 and 2TB HDD for $99. 

 

Out of curiosity could Sickbeard but run for a secondary flash drive? That would seem a less expensive solution. I'm roughly aware that the flash drive would give out over time, but that the expensive cost what would it really matter? Thoughts?

It's not hard. Set the cache drive to a minimum free space larger than the largest file you will every copy to the sharres. If 4gig is the largest file then set it to 6gig or 8gig. If you copy to the share and the cache is more full than that minimum free space it will put the file directly to the array.

 

Alternatively, you could just turn-off the cache disk for the user shares in question and copy everything right to the array.

The only real reason I'm getting a cache drive in the first palce is to install plugins, I am not overly concerned about boosting write speed. I would like to do this inexpensively and have been lookin at stepping down from a 128GB SSD to a 64GB.  My concern is from reading that this would limit my daily writes to say less than 60GB. While that is extremely rare its still possible maybe once or twice a year. In this event am I able to bypass the cache and write whatever I want?

 

If that is your only reason for getting a cache drive I would avoid this by simply turning cache of for all folders that you do large transfers to (or even for all), that way you will have a "cache drive" but there will be limited (or no) caching. It can be specified per user share.

 

I have for example turned off caching for personal documents and folders, but turned it on for large file transfers (movies share). In your case I would simply turn it of totally... That way the total SDD would be available for apps..

Which is part of what I was thinking, however I guess I feel like its kind of a waste of space to spend that much on a drive just for apps. Something smaller would eaisly do the trick. Thats why I was curious if flash would be a possibility. I know that you CAN install the apps on the unraid flash drive but it can cause issues down the road. Why not on a second flash drive? I may be way off here and trying to think of something that would be a total failure. Just don't want to spend say $60-70 on a 64GB SSD that would only ever see 1/10th of that used.

Why not on a second flash drive? I may be way off here and trying to think of something that would be a total failure.

 

Interesting. Would that be possible? Ther's only one app i'm using - Plex, and I'd like to move it to external drive, so the hard drives can spin down, but it seems overkill to plug additional drive just for Plex. I'm not really interested in in cache drive and speed increase as I use unraid solely for the purpose of storing and streaming media.

Something to keep in mind: the cache drive will be formated with ReiserFS which does not not support TRIM for the SSD.  So you either need an SSD with its own firmware garbage collection (many do not have this, but some do) or you can format the drive with ext4 and then use it as an app drive (read: not cache and not part of the array) and then you will get TRIM support.

You can use a flash drive. You just have to format and mount it yourself. SNAP makes the mounting part easy or a command in the go script would work.

So totally reasonable to install apps on a second flash drive. Have Sab download to the flash drive and then Sickbeard move them to the correct folders on the array. Have no realy Linuz or command line knowledge is this something I should be able to accomplish?