Good afternoon folks,

 

I'm getting ready to upgrade to unRAID 6 and as a result, I've made a few additions to my server, including 2 Samsung EVO 840 SSD drives.

 

I'm looking for a bit of advice to achieve the best performance possible.

 

I'm running a Supermicro X9SCM motherboard which has 2 SATA III and 4 SATA II connections onboard. I also have 1 Supermicro AOC -SAS2LP-MV8 SATA (PCI-E 8X) and 2 Supermicro AOC -SASLP-MV8 SATA expansion cards (PCI-E 4X).

 

What I'm wondering is what SATA connection should I use for my two new SSD drives which I intend to use for a cache pool and for my parity drive? Should I use the 2 SATA III ports on the motherboard for the SSD cache drives? Should I use the SAS2LP card which is in one of the PCI-E 8X slots? What about the parity drive?

 

Is there any benefit to using different connections to use different bridges into the CPU?

 

Once on unRAID 6, I'll be moving my plug-ins (SickBeard, SABNZBD, etc.) from a dedicated drive over the my cache pool.

 

Or I am over-thinking this and I wouldn't see a significant difference either way?

 

Lastly, I gather, I should NOT use my SSD drives until I install unRAID 6, correct? Right now, they are in the case and powered but aren't part of the array.

 

Thanks for your help.

In general I go with the motherboard ports to be the fastest.

 

I'd try the SATA3 ports for the SSDs.

In general I go with the motherboard ports to be the fastest.

 

I'd try the SATA3 ports for the SSDs.

 

Thanks!