November 24, 201411 yr I have the Lian Li PC-Q25 case and the ASRock E3C226D2I mobo. I currently have a parity drive, two data drives and a cache drive, so I haven't had to add a sata card yet. Down the road I might want to add a video card for VMs, so I am trying to avoid adding a sata card if I can. I'm looking for the best way to add a dual SSD btrfs cache pool to the system. The cache pool will be for dockers and VMs, as well as a standard cache drive. My current cache drive will become a data drive. The cheapest option would be two standard 2.5" ssds. The Lian Li case has room for one 2.5" drive on the bottom rack. Are there brackets that would allow me to stack two 2.5" ssds in the same space? This would work, but then I'd be out of sata ports. Moving up from there, any thoughts on using one of these to hold two mSATA drives in a single 2.5" space on a single sata port? http://www.addonics.com/products/ad252msdr.php To use them as JBOD, it requires a "Port Multiplier compatible SATA port", does my mobo have that? How bad of a performance hit would it be to have two ssds on a single sata port? Syba has a similar product, but the reviews on Amazon and Newegg are terrible: http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=1488¤tPage=0 If I have to buy a card, this one is interesting because it has two mSATA sockets and 2 SATA iii ports: http://www.addonics.com/products/ad4sahmsa.php That would allow me to use all the available drive bays in the Lian Li plus have dual mSATA cache drives. Unfortunately, it would use my only pcie slot. Thanks for any advice you can give!
November 25, 201411 yr For me I gave up on the idea of a cache pool. It's the reason I have 2 - 120 GB ssd's. After a few errors I couldn't fix and reformatting them a couple times. Also I didn't really need the cache protection. I just backup my vm's to the array. If I were you I'd just try a 256GB fast ssd and see how it works for you then you can think about adding another if it wasn't. If your taking about using them on one sata port it would be better to have one fast drive. They do make brackets for dual 2.5". You could just velcro it also. Or make a simple bracket system out of four pieces of 1" plastic or metal and screw the 2 ssd's together like a rack.
November 26, 201411 yr Author Thanks dmaicias, I was going for the protection but if it isn't stable yet there isn't much point. I can do a single SSD now and put off the decision on what to do with my one pcie slot a little longer
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