Looking for some feedback on an idea.

 

I currently have a 750 GB WD Black Cache drive and a 250 GB Samsung SSD (SNAP Disk housing my Virtual Machines). My 250 GB SSD is no longer large enough to house all of my virtual machines so I am looking into a few ideas. The best option would be to purchase a larger / second SSD drive and mount it as SNAP but that is not in the budget.

 

I was thinking about purchasing a larger spinner (2-3TB) to replace my cache drive; however, I want to know if what I am planning would be to much for a spinner...

 

So my questions:

1. Can a spinner handle the following (A, B & C) at the same time with it being noticeably slow:

 

A. Act as a normal cache drive and move the data once a day

B. House all my application data for Plex, CP, SB, Deluge (It's safe to assume that the drive will be reading data 24/7 and probably writing data for a few hours each day)

C. Run 1 Windows VM. This VM would not be on 24/7 but once it's running I would want things to be relatively quick. (I understand it wouldn't be SSD quick).

 

2. If a spinner could handle A, B & C, I would assume a 7200 RPM would be mandatory?

 

3. On a side note, is there a speed difference on running a 5200 vs 7200 RPM drive for cache or is the gigabit network limiting the bottleneck?

 

4. Are there any known issues if the cache drive is the largest drive in the array?

What I would do, I would buy second SSD of exactly same size and, probably, same make/model, and mount the two of them into some RAID0 3.5" adapter like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817990020

 

It will be twice the size of one, and also considerably faster.

 

3. On a side note, is there a speed difference on running a 5200 vs 7200 RPM drive for cache or is the gigabit network limiting the bottleneck?

From personal experience - you probably wouldn't notice the difference if you never multi-task the drive. However, if you do multi-task, there will be very noticeable difference between 5200 and 7200 drives. Again, from personal experience - I multi-task the drive all the time, so I ended up with RAID0 pool of two 7200s for cache drive... and still wish it was even faster. This, however, really depends on mode of operation.

 

 

I have Plex/Sonarr/NZBGet/Transmission running on an Intel SSD mounted via SNAP.  The cache drive is a 320GB WD Black 2.5" and only does cache.  works well enough, apart from manually mounting the SNAP drive at boot, then starting Docker.  Other than that it works perfectly.

 

If you want to run a 3.5" drive 24/7, I'd certainly be going for a 7200rpm drive like a WD Black or RE4.  I did use a 500Gb WD Blue and it worked just fine, I only moved to the SSD/Black combo to save a 3.5" bay.