March 15, 201610 yr Hi guys, I have a couple of questions on how the cache drive works when pooling hard drives. Suppose I have the following: 64GB SSD 500GB SSD 1TB 7200RPM HDD (WD Blue) The 64GB SSD is currently being used in my HTPC. I'm hoping to virtualise my HTPC and perhaps use this SSD for the virtual disk. Another VM I'm thinking of spinning up is a workstation PC. I'd like this to reside on the 500GB SSD (and perhaps allocated 256GB to it). I'll keep the other space for additional VM's and/or Dockers. On the 1TB WD Blue I'm thinking of putting on a torrenting/VPN VM so it has loads of storage space. Still 500GB would be loads. What would be the best way to approach this and is it even possible to somehow put the different VM's on different drives and yet provide redundancy (even if I added a second WD Blue)? I'm guessing the easiest solution is a couple of 1TB SSD's but that's very expensive. Secondly, what's the rough write performance of going straight to the array (with parity) from the torrenting VM and not using a cache drive for temporary storage and the mover? Thanks.
April 22, 201610 yr Something i just learned today, if you add another 1TB blue as you describe then you can BTRFS Raid-5 them all together and get 1.5TB usable. Although i probably wouldn't recommend that. I have no idea what performance that will give you because the WD Blue drives will slow down the entire array. A better idea would be to buy another 500GB SSD and BTRFS Raid-1 them together for 532GB usable. Then just throw the 1TB blue in with the unRAID pool. I would bet the Raid-1 SSD will beat the Raid5 with Blue's by any benchmark.
April 23, 201610 yr Dont do funky Raid, unless you are 100% sure of what u r doing or just testing a system. In your case, I would throw the 1TB in array, 500GB as cache and mount the 64GB as Unassigned Device. But that is not really how unRAID is supposed to be used, I think.
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