Hot standby, cache, and app data location config

[rutherford]

I have a five drive (4 disks plus 1 parity) unraid server, shucked 8tb Seagate drives. All of it is less than a year old. I had a drive scare a bit back there and bought a sixth identical drive. It was sitting on top of the server for a while.

 

that's silly. I plugged it in with the intention to use it as a hot standby.

 

Thats silly it's plugged in, just sitting there, may as well use it as a cache drive. Maybe that isn't silly because I'm putting hours on a drive that's intended to be a standby drive. Well, I decided to do it anyhow.

 

Now I'm getting an error from Fix Common Problems that my appdata isn't on the cache drive. I don't particularly care about speed on any of this, except for Plex transcoding. And clearly some array write speeds, or I wouldn't have done the cache drive in the first place. 

 

So I'm just looking for feedback on how you use hot standbys, where the drive is, being used or not, etc. 

 

Ya know, I do have another dinky drive somewhere I should probably just also plug in and use as an actual cache drive and take those hours off the hot standby.. 

 

Any more thoughts? Thanks!