Right now my current system has no more SATA ports available, but I can make room to convert one drive to a cache drive. I don't want to install a second controller since I'm going to start to build another box soon.

 

What's the safest way to create a cache drive once I empty out a drive? I'm only going to use one of the smallest drives in my array, which is a 1TB drive for my cache. I also do NOT want to use the cache drive as a "cache" drive at all. I want all my writes to write directly to the array and not use a cache drive at all. I did read there is a way to setup a cache drive to be installed and not use it as a cache drive. Is the secret in the setup of the user shares? In the config where you can exclude disks? Since I never had a cache drive I don't know if you can exclude that drive with user shares.

 

Or, would it be easier just to empty out a data drive and then exclude that drive on all my user shares so nothing writes to it?

Why have a cache driver if you're not going to use it as a cache drive?

 

The way I look at it I can see two ways here.

 

1.  Setup all your user shares to not use the cache drive.

Or

2. Use this plugin to mount the drive as a non-array drive.

Why have a cache driver if you're not going to use it as a cache drive?

 

The way I look at it I can see two ways here.

 

1.  Setup all your user shares to not use the cache drive.

Or

2. Use this plugin to mount the drive as a non-array drive.

Because you can use cache pools for your apps drive. So option 1, except with one user share for apps set to cache-only.

 

Also, go ahead and invest in an SSD. They are getting pretty cheap and you won't need a very big one if you're not caching writes. My cache is 2 x 120 GB SSDs in btrfs raid1 pool for dockers, apps, and VMs, I don't cache writes either. You could just start with 1 SSD and add other(s) later.

Why have a cache driver if you're not going to use it as a cache drive?

 

The way I look at it I can see two ways here.

 

1.  Setup all your user shares to not use the cache drive.

Or

2. Use this plugin to mount the drive as a non-array drive.

Because you can use cache pools for your apps drive. So option 1, except with one user share for apps set to cache-only.

 

Also, go ahead and invest in an SSD. They are getting pretty cheap and you won't need a very big one if you're not caching writes. My cache is 2 x 120 GB SSDs in btrfs raid1 pool for dockers, apps, and VMs, I don't cache writes either. You could just start with 1 SSD and add other(s) later.

 

Yeah, that makes sense, got a bit confused by the question, my mind (semi) works in strange ways.  I have an SSD mounted with gfjardim's plugin which contains my docker.img, VM imgs & isos.  My appdata is on my cache though.