Does (can) cache drive improve read speeds?

[adoucette]

I get that the cache drive temporarily stores new data written to the unRAID pool and then transfers it to the pool at a specified time.

Is it possible for the cache drive to also store a copy of some user-specified folders so that read speeds might benefit? EG MyDocuments folder backed up to unRAID, multiple home computers sync this folder with it every few minutes, hence lots of reading that folder. If a copy of that folder was on the cache SSD drive, the read speed might be improved for that folder.

[SSD]

No - this is not a feature of the cache drive nor do I think it is needed. I am curious if you are asking the question in a theoretical sense, or if you are experiencing slowness in real world use. If you wanted to accomplish this you could, but might require some batch files or shell scripts to accomplish something similar.

 

Reads of files from the unRaid array are fast. There is no "read penalty." For normal "My Document" sized files even writes will be quite fast. Since the spinning drives are faster than gigabit network speed, the bottleneck in read speed is not the drives. You may have a delay due to the drive spinup on the first access after a long pause, but that is it.

 

If you want your documents on an SSD, you can out then there and protect them with a cache pool (similar to RAID1).

 

 

 

 

[jonp]

You could create a cache only user share.  If you use a cache pool, your data stays protected.

[danioj]

You could create a cache only user share.  If you use a cache pool, your data stays protected.

 

It is also worth noting that you need to be running v6.x and would have to have your cache drives formatted with a btrfs filesystem in order to take advantage of the cache pool feature and the redundancy that Jonp is talking about.

 

https://lime-technology.com/category/cache-pool/

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/UnRAID_Manual_6#Creating_a_Cache_Pool