September 24, 20196 yr Hey folks, While I am waiting on my build parts to arrive in order to start tinkering with Unraid, I did some searching on the forums here with mixed results so I wanted to see if the community would be willing to give me some perspective and insight on the cache pool before I get rolling. Is there a limit on how many drives can be in a cache pool? Is there a best practice for the size of a drive? I am using this machine as a Plex server/media sourcer (newsgroups mainly), if that helps. What's the word on NVMe cache pools? Is it any better to use the faster I/O on those devices for my use case (see #2) even if it will over-saturate the array when migrating files? I haven't purchased the cache drives yet because I'm unsure about the above and it will guide my purchase there. Thanks folks!
September 24, 20196 yr There are many ways to answer your questions and different people will have different uses. Do you have a good idea of the ways in which people typically use cache? How do you intend to use cache?
September 24, 20196 yr 1. Up to 24 devices in the cache pool 2. Depends on amount of data you will be grabbing and how often you want the mover to transfer the data to the array. I would go for a minimum of 256gb ssd. I use 2 1tb m.2 drives in btrfs raid 0 for high I/O and speed but you could do a mirror for protection or just go with one single drive with no loss protection. 3. NVMe is absolutely better but not needed if you don't need the higher I/O and speed.
September 24, 20196 yr Author I don't know how others use the cache specifically. But I know, that for my sake, I want to be able to use newsgroups (apps like Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr/SABnzbd) and I know they can take a toll on the random read/write of drives when using them conventionally, so I suspect it may be good to have a good cache for writing files coming from newsgroup sources as they could be large and one doesn't want to hammer the actual array until it's time to offload. I could see files up to 25-30gb downloading up to 5-8 files at any given time during much of the day/evening depending on the requests and needs. I'm also considering a LANCache but that won't be a constant download, most likely I'll download a bunch of stuff up front then the LANcache will be refreshed after I have a LAN event at the house. --edit-- Supplemental context: the main use cases for my server are in order of priority - Plex/Newsgroups Downloads/LANCache/Game Servers Edited September 24, 20196 yr by SNDS
September 24, 20196 yr Author *BUMP* Anyone have thoughts on the drive size and pool size? I'm thinking of going @jpowell8672's route and use dual 1TB NVMe drives in Raid 0 for newsgroup services and LANCache use cases. As an aside, what's the max that one can do for parity drives? I was thinking of getting 2 4TB 7200RPM drives for parity.
September 25, 20196 yr 13 hours ago, SNDS said: use dual 1TB NVMe drives in Raid 0 Are you sure you don't mean raid1?
September 25, 20196 yr 5 hours ago, trurl said: Are you sure you don't mean raid1? Im running 2 Samsung m.2 nvme 970 pro 1tb in raid 0 for the speed and I/O because these are premium quality m.2's which are less likely to fail. Yes I know any can fail at any time but I regularly backup to my array so if 1 or both died I would be fine and not need the raid 1. I get the faster speed, I/O & 2tb of space.
September 25, 20196 yr Author 3 hours ago, jpowell8672 said: Im running 2 Samsung m.2 nvme 970 pro 1tb in raid 0 for the speed and I/O because these are premium quality m.2's which are less likely to fail. Yes I know any can fail at any time but I regularly backup to my array so if 1 or both died I would be fine and not need the raid 1. I get the faster speed, I/O & 2tb of space. This.
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