I have done some searching and can't quite figure out how to do this.  I would like to short stroke a WD black 500 gig drive to use as a cache drive.  Could someone point me to info on how to do this with a WD drive.  I found some info on Hitachi, but not WD.

 

Thanks,

craigr

The procedure is the same for all drives. But why?

Well, I would like to get the most speed possible out of my cache drive by short stroking.  The only info I found on short stroking in unRAID was in this post that goes to this link that covers Hitachi drives:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=5754.0

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/short-stroking-hdd,2157.html

 

Do you or anyone have a link to how to short stroke in unRAID?  I guess I don't have the correct info.

 

Thanks again,

craigr

 

The speed is limited to about 117MBps by Gig-E.

 

See here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=11183.0

Probably the simplest tool to do this is HDAT2

http://www.hdat2.com/

 

Just use the Set Max function to make the drive "look" like whatever size you want.  For example, if you used a 500GB WD Black as your cache, but only wanted to use 50GB of it, you'd use Set Max to make it effectively a 50GB disk.    This 50 GB would be on the outermost cylinders of the drive, so it'd be the fastest part of the drive; and since you'd be using less than 10% of the cylinders on the drive, the seek times would be notably lower as well.