Questions about high water and cache

[Jeff in Indy]

I've ordered parts, and waiting for them to come in to build my first UnRAID server!  A couple of questions...

 

I'm going to start with 2 new drives (I've already purchased them and ran Pre-Clear on them), set one up as parity and the other one as a drive.  I'll take one of my current data drives on my desktop (starting with Plex TV Shows), move them to the UnRAID drive.  Once it's emptied, I'll pre-clear it and install it as a 2nd drive.  I will continue to empty drives, adding them as data drives in the array.  I'm also going to have 2 120GB SSD drives as a cache, mirrored.

 

Question 1:  Does it make sense to hold off on the cache drive until AFTER I move all the data from the old drives and get the array set up?  Is there a down side to it?

 

Question 2:  If I set a share as High Water with a single drive, move a bunch of files to it, then install a 2nd drive, does it immediately move half of the files over, or will it start writing files to the second drive when I have new files to write?

 

Thanks, guys!

[itimpi]

1).  You can install the cache drive immediately.    It is up to you whether individual shares are set to use the cache - probably best not to for initial load.

 

2). Unraid never moves files between array drives automatically.   Any such process is always manual.