Optane 900P for cache drive?

[Blindsay]

Hey all, 

 

Curious if anyone has tried (or if it is even possible) running something like - https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167437 as a cache drive for unraid? 

[Blindsay]

Old thread (of mine) but i want to revisit this, would i be ok using this (or a pair) as a cache drive in unraid? Other than the differences in the tech i think at its core its just an nvme drive so that should be ok right?

[StevenD]

Pretty serious overkill, IMHO.  

[Blindsay]

12 hours ago, StevenD said:

Pretty serious overkill, IMHO.  

you are certainly entitled to your opinion but i just need to know if it will work with unraid

[JorgeB]

It's a standard NVMe device, no reason for not working with Unraid.

[Blindsay]

2 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

It's a standard NVMe device, no reason for not working with Unraid.

Thats what i figured but i wanted to confirm (I havent even used an nvme drive with unraid yet).

 

Thanks!

[JorgeB]

5 minutes ago, Blindsay said:

I havent even used an nvme drive with unraid yet

I'm using one since v6.2

[skaterpunk0187]

I googled for days trying to find info on if optane aic's are supported in unraid. I could not find a definitive answer, so I took the plunge and bought one and hoped it worked. I received it today (4-3-19) I popped it in and it shows up in the drive list. To say the least it's an AMAZING cache drive. I'm still on a trial but I came from freenas and I was considering going back. I love being able to use any size drive to add to the "array" over freenas having to add drives in the same number of the original drives used. Computers and networking is my hobby I can buy 4 drives at a time. The unraid interface is good and the help in every menu is awesome and the amount of plugins far exceeds freenas. Back tp my point the write speed of Unraid is so AWFUL! So much so that it tool almost the whole trial just to get my data on Unraid so not much trail to get data to test. Be fore the optane I was running two 850 evo SSDs in raid0 over 10gbe network even that was pretty poor write speed barely more then the ZFS array write speed. I popped in the Optane 900P and BAM I'm writing at 550 MB/s, thats the max read speeds on my cheap desktop's NVME drive. Reads speeds are okay but i have way too much data to store on SSDs and im getting full disk speed which is tolerable since i pull from my storage device very little but I write to it a ton. I'm hoping Ill be able to get an extension for the trial key to test a bit more to be sure but it looks like Lime Tech maybe getting another paid key (or two). Anyone using Unraid with 10GBE and Optane nvme is a must.

[kizer]

You need to look up Turbo Write. It more or less let’s you write faster to the array speeding up the Parity Write. 

[skaterpunk0187]

Yes I did look into that all it looks to be is a script that makes Tunable (md_write_method): enter reconstruct write. I manually set that option under disk settings. That did make write speeds better but still nowhere near disk speed and still not great. If I had to do it again I would setup the array without the parity drive assigned copy data at full disk speed and after completed assign the parity disk and let it build. I would recommend that for others as well. now that its transferred I send about a 100-150gigs every few days and the cache can cover that amount and I don't have to see how slow it gets written to disk.

Thank you for the suggestion