I tried searching the forums for Raid cache drive, unfortunately it pulls up everything unRaid and cache drive. So if this is already been covered, I apologize.

 

Anyways, I have 2-128gb Corsair GS SSDs, that I would like to re-purpose for my cache drive. My question is 2 part:

 

First is using 2 drives in Raid 0, possible as a drive cache? The increased space and speed would be perfect for me. I was able to get 800-1000MBs read and writes in a hardware Raid 0 for windows.

 

Second is it possible to setup my cache drive to be backed-up but not moved?  From what I understand from the wiki, to prevent a folder and it's sub-directories from being moved, I just need to insert a "." at the front of the folder name?

 

What I would like to use my cache drive for is the incredible read speeds. So I would like to be able to install all my applications/plugins/dockers to my cache drive. Obviously not to be moved. Also for my Virtual Machines, I plan on running a Windows and Ubuntu VM, and would like the OS and applications installed on the SSD for fast read access, while adding another Vdisk image for larger media files pointed to my array.

 

Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance!

For RAID0 you will need hardware support, either a RAID card to connect them to or one of those snazzy adapters that you slide two 2.5" drives into and configure as RAID0 (or other types) and the volume appears as a single drive to the OS.

 

My opinion is that a single SSD is going to be fast enough in almost all cases. You might consider using the built-in support for Cache "drive group" (can't recall what it is called right now) where the OS will stripe them as RAID1 for redundancy.

You can also manually force a btrfs raid 0 pool without the use of a hardware raid, although performance today won't be as strong as it will be in a future release.  I recently tested btrfs raid 0 with our SSD performance fix and still haven't hit max speed yet (need a faster source to copy from for testing).