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Cache Disk hardware compatible with SuperMicro MB?


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Posted

Fellow Forum Members,
My UnRaid OS is running on a SuperMicro X10SRH-CF motherboard, with 64GB of ECC RAM and a XEON processor.

 

I need to add a Cache Disk to an existing UnRaid Server which today successfully completed a Parity Setup Process that lasted 27 hours. Additionally, all hard drives have been successfully formatted. However, I am not creating shares at this time because I first want to complete work on setting up a Cache disk.

 

I am thinking of buying two 2tb Crucial SSD drives shown in the link below:

 

https://www.newegg.com/crucial-mx500-2tb/p/N82E16820156175

 

Originally I wanted to go with two Samsung Pro 2TB SSDs but the price is crazy:

 

https://www.newegg.com/samsung-860-pro-series-2tb/p/N82E16820147680

 

I need help with  selecting a PCI SATA controller card that is compatible with my SuperMicro X10SRH-CF motherboard. Because I am not sure if the PCI SATA Controller card shown in the link below is going to successfully work with both my SuperMicro X10SRH-CF motherboard and my UnRaid OS:

 

https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-00CH-047Z5?Description=PCI SATA controller card&cm_re=PCI_SATA_controller_card-_-9SIAK7VBHX4215-_-Product

 

Some closing questions:

  1. Are the Crucial SSDs as good as the Samsung Pro SSDs for use in a Cache Disk setup? My thinking is why spend the extra money if the specs are a close match.
  2. Is the PCI SATA controller card I am considering the best one in terms of throughput data speed, quality and compatibility with my SuperMicro X10SRH-CF motherboard?  If not can someone please recommend a better one?
  3. Will my UnRaid OS be able to recognize my RAID 1 Cache Disk setup as a single hard drive?
  4. Lastly, what is the best RAID configuration to use for a Cache Disk setup? RAID 0?  RAID 1?  Or RAID 5?  

 

Any opinions will be greatly appreciated.

Posted

My goal is not to use any of the remaining SATA and SAS ports I have remaining on the motherboard because I am going to need them in the future. Therefore, I need to buy a PCI SATA Controller card.

 

Is anybody out there running a Supermicro motherboard with a PCI SATA Controller card installed?  If yes, can you please share the model number of the PCI SATA Controller card you are using.  I just want to buy a good card that is compatible with my Supermicro motherboard. Thank you for any help.

Posted

Why use a SATA SSD?  Why not NVME?

 

I have a Supermicro with an X9 board (older than yours) and run a cheap 2TB NVME with a very high TBW (3200 TBW) in a PCIE adapter. (Read and write speeds are crazy fast!)

https://www.microcenter.com/product/608649/inland-premium-2tb-ssd-3d-nand-m2-2280-pcie-nvme-30-x4-internal-solid-state-drive

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01FU9JS94/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

I assume you have an open PCIE slot on the board.  The X10 boards also support bifurcation.  So you could run multiple NVME drives on one card.

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-M-2-X16-V2-Threadripper/dp/B07NQBQB6Z

 

See this thread on servethehome

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/x10-bifurcation-support.17465/

 

 

Posted

Hugenbdd,

Thanks for your post. I found it to be very helpful and eye opening. Your suggestion is one that makes a lot of sense.  Hypothetically speaking, let's say I have the StarTech PCI adapter card installed on my bifurcated motherboard and on that PCI card I have a 1TB and 4TB NVME card installed. Is it within the UnRaid OS setup parameters to use the 1TB card strictly for the Docker apps to install to? And use the 4TB card only to perform fast data transfer operations  to the UnRaid array?  According to the link below making that happen is problematic.

 

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/39561-add-second-cache-drive/

 

Hugenbdd, can you share if your UnRaid OS successfully recognizes two separate NVME cards as two separate cache disks?  It will help me out a lot if you can expand on this matter. 

 

 

 

Posted

Can I ask why you need a 4tb cache, just interested?

 

Mover clears the cache every night as default and I only use cache to speed up write to the raid operations so that parity isn't calculated/I don't write to slow spinning disks. 

Posted

Wobblewoo, thanks for the post. Your description of how you are using a cache disk makes a lot of sense. However, what if you have 20tb of data stored in an old RAID system you need to transfer over to your new UnRaid system? Wouldn't such a task get done faster if it was done using a 4tb cache disk as opposed to 500gb cache disk?  Please reply back with a post if you think there is something wrong with this reasoning.  I do not claim to be an expert. I am on this forum to learn how to best build and use the new UnRaid system I am building.

Posted

Ahh I see. 

 

So your copying 20tb (in <4tb chunks) over the network to the cache, then mover moves it to the array overnight clearing the cache for the next days move.

 

Is the 20tb on an unraid system now? What's the data stored on?

 

Look at using unnasigned devices and krusader to move the data.

Posted

Correct. My old 20tb RAID6 Array is filled to capacity. It utilizes 10 hard drives and when I boot up this old machine all the data stored on it appears on my old Windows7 system as a single folder.  In short, I need to move all 20TB of data over to my new UnRaid System build and thanks to how you mentioned to look into Krusader and Unassigned Devices this task is less of a mystery to me now.

 

The YouTube video in the link below gave me a great insight to Krusadar:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0XCFPAsWZE

 

Before watching this video my thinking was I was going to have to CAT6 cable connect both my 20TB RAID6 machine and my new UnRaid Array to a common router and transfer the data within a network.  However, after watching this Krusader video I now learned it is possible to connect both machines via a USB connection to move data between them. I have to research "unassigned drives" a bit more because I do not fully understand how to make that happen.

 

Does using Krusader eliminate the expense of buying a 4tb cache disk and instead downgrade to a smaller size cache disk?  Lastly, does anybody know a good link that shows the best way to transfer data from an old RAID6 machine over to a new UnRaid machine using Krusader and Unassigned drives?

 

 

 

 

Posted

When you are bulk copying data, caching slows down the process as a whole, because the data is transferred twice. Once to the cache drive at line speed or close to it, the second time from the cache drive to the main array.

 

When you are dumping mass amounts of data, more than will fit on the cache drive, it's faster just to disable caching, turn on turbo write, and fill the disks as you see fit.

 

Also, if you are spanning multiple disks with your shares, you have to be very careful when copying mass amounts at once, if your share settings (allocation, min free, split, inc / exc) are wrong, it's easy to overrun one of the disks, because some copy methods write a directory tree first before filling in the files, and if the folder already exists on a specific drive it will try to be used.

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