I have a Parity, disk 1-5 in my machine, all of these disks are HDD except Disk 5 which is an SSD. Disk5 share is not included with any of the other disk shares. I want to remove it from the share array and then assign it as a 2nd Cache disk. I currently have a 120GB SSD as a cache and want to use the 240GB SSD as secondary cache.

 

Based on my reading so far I have to shutdown array and goto new configuration to get this to work. Please advise if this is the correct method?

Yes. New Config, reassign all drives, let parity rebuild. Be sure you don't assign a data drive as parity or it will be overwritten.

Thanks I will set it up before I go to bed tonight as I assume it takes a long time.

I did this but then realised afterwards that it was not the best solution as they are now in RAID and I am not able to access the full 240GB on the 2nd disk as the 1st disk is only 120GB. I need at least 100GB just for the Windows VM. Can I now remove the 2nd cache and then check parity again and then have 1 cache, 4 HHD disks on array and use the 240GB SSD as an unassigned drive with the Windows 10 VM on it?

 

I have copied the info from the cache to the array in preparation for this, so I do not lose any of the information.

It is possible to set your cache pool as raid0 instead of the default raid1. You get no redundancy (mirror) that way but you get all the storage added together.

 

See here

Thanks for the quick response.

 

I am going to change the settings in cache balance and hopefully it works without any errors, I have backed up all of the files from the cache just in case. Is a reboot required after making the changes to balance?