General questions unRAID, Microserver Gen 8, pfsense

[XenapZ]

Hi!

 

Not sure if this is the right section, or even the right forum for this since it involves more then unRAID but I though I would start here.

 

So I've been trying to use my Microserver without any upgrades for some time but eventually I realized I needed some upgrades, my configuration will look like this when I get my new toys:

 

2 x Kingston HP DDR3 KTH-PL316E/8G 8GB 1600Mhz ECC Unbuffered RAM 

Intel Xeon E3-1265L V2 2.5 GHz

2 WD Red 4 TB

2 WD Red 6 TB, one for parity

Samsung 128GB SSD MZ-7PD128M for cache

 

My only bottleneck now should be the SSD, since it fills up way to fast when I start downloading some big files causing problems with deluge.

I was going to buy a new 500GB one but I got an offer to buy an Intel 600p M.2 SSD 1TB for about the same price, could I use something like this to get it running as a cachedrive in unRAID?

https://www.inet.se/produkt/5406030/adapter-delock-pcie-m-2-pcie-3-0

 

If so, could I keep my 128GB drive and use it only for dockers, VMs and similar?

 

Lastly I'm interested in running a pfsense VM on the Microserver. Generally for more stable cross network VPN, adblocking and just for the fun of it.

 

Do any of you guys see a problem with doing this on my setup?

[trurl]

There is no requirement to cache user share writes, and many of us don't. I only use my cache drive for dockers and some cache-only shares which hold copies of frequently accessed data. Since most of the writes to my server are unattended downloads and backups, I don't care if writing to the user shares isn't as fast as possible. So they go straight to the protected array.

 

You might reconsider your caching strategy. Maybe you don't need large SSDs.

[XenapZ]

10 minutes ago, trurl said:

There is no requirement to cache user share writes, and many of us don't. I only use my cache drive for dockers and some cache-only shares which hold copies of frequently accessed data. Since most of the writes to my server are unattended downloads and backups, I don't care if writing to the user shares isn't as fast as possible. So they go straight to the protected array.

 

You might reconsider your caching strategy. Maybe you don't need large SSDs.

Well that is a fair point. Do you know what sort of speed difference we would be talking about when downloading?

Right now I usually peak at about 18 MBps.

[trurl]

10 minutes ago, XenapZ said:

Right now I usually peak at about 18 MBps

Is that downloading to cache? Or downloading to the parity array? Either way it sounds like you are limited by your download speed and not by the write speed. Typically you can get 40+ when writing to the parity array, and 100+ writing to cache.

[XenapZ]

23 minutes ago, trurl said:

Is that downloading to cache? Or downloading to the parity array? Either way it sounds like you are limited by your download speed and not by the write speed. Typically you can get 40+ when writing to the parity array, and 100+ writing to cache.

My misstake, I tried downloading some big files now and I got about 24 MiB/s when downloading to the cache.

Are you saying I could get those speeds if I download directly to the array?

[trurl]

3 minutes ago, XenapZ said:

My misstake, I tried downloading some big files now and I got about 24 MiB/s when downloading to the cache.

Are you saying I could get those speeds if I download directly to the array?

Try it.

[XenapZ]

3 hours ago, trurl said:

Try it.

I'll give it a shot later on, thanks mate.