All my other drives need preclearing (Just got my first set up & built it), so, they're currently doing that, only issue is that due to the fact I reinstalled windows so I've lost my plex set up (and I'd rather not install it & leave loads of files over my drive/registry just for a day or two) and I wanted to copy ~ 1 season worth of a show and set up plex onto my cache drive, then, when the array was put up it'd copy them over to the correct drives/etc.

 

So, no way to start with purely a cache drive?

You can mount the drive you are going to use as cache.  You have to make the directory then mount the drive.  Added that drive to smb-extra.conf then restart samba.  I can give you more detail when I get to a computer.  I'm also not 100% if restarting samba will share the mounted drive as I've always rebooted.  You can also just mount and share the drive with unmenu which is dead easy but it will be shared using the device name ie.  sdc1 So if your setting up paths to the drive you would have to change them once the drive is mounted as cache. 

 

For example I tested and did all my configuration on a test computer running v5 free version that doesn't allow a cache drive.  I wanted to have all my programs setup with the right paths so I could just move the config over to my working server. So I mounted a disk and named it cache so all my paths would be /mnt/cache

 

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I727 using Tapatalk 2

 

 

You can mount the drive you are going to use as cache.  You have to make the directory then mount the drive.  Added that drive to smb-extra.conf then restart samba.  I can give you more detail when I get to a computer.  I'm also not 100% if restarting samba will share the mounted drive as I've always rebooted.  You can also just mount and share the drive with unmenu which is dead easy but it will be shared using the device name ie.  sdc1 So if your setting up paths to the drive you would have to change them once the drive is mounted as cache. 

 

For example I tested and did all my configuration on a test computer running v5 free version that doesn't allow a cache drive.  I wanted to have all my programs setup with the right paths so I could just move the config over to my working server. So I mounted a disk and named it cache so all my paths would be /mnt/cache

 

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I727 using Tapatalk 2

 

Meh, if it's not as easy as something in the web-UI it's probably not worth it, I'll just throw a 1TB drive on the array once it's done preclearing (Hopefully < 24Hours)

You can just assign it to disk1 and re-assign it to the cache location later. Copy all the stuff over. You can setup things that require the mnt/cache path but it won't work until you re-assign. No parity so no parity build on initial array start will be required.