Cache Drive vs. Unassigned Device for Plex


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Okay everyone, pulling everything together carefully and then when picking up my PSU (especially with the shortage at the moment), it's only got (1) 6-Pin PSU to 4x SATA and (1) 6-pin PSU to 2x SATA cable in the box.  I can order the cable from BTOS Integration but because I'm in Canada, I'm looking at about US$25 (or closing in on C$40 after exchange) for the one cable -- yes, US$20 shipping on a US$5 cable.

 

Since I'm picking up an ASRock Rack X470D4U board, I can run M.2 devices on-board instead of relying on a 120GB Kingston SSD I picked up back in January when rebuilding my media server.  Since I'm doing a complete rebuild, I decided it's probably better to pick up a drive or two.

Obviously, having an unassigned device for the Plex Media Library (and metadata) is probably a good start -- this way, things will be zippier.  Not sure how big of a drive or speed I need for this.  Then there's the cache drive that needs to be replaced.  Naturally, as we get more and more into 4K media, file sizes are getting bigger.  120 GB is definitely not sufficient.

From the literature on my board, the following is written:

Quote

The M.2, also known as the Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF), is a small size and versatile card edge connector that aims to replace mPCIe and mSATA. The M.2_SSD (NGFF) Socket 3 (M2_1) can accommodate either a M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen 2 x4 (20Gb/s). The M.2_SSD (NGFF) Socket 3 (M2_2) can accommodate either a M.2 SATA3 6.0 Gb/s module or a M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen 3 x2 (16Gb/s).

With this in mind, what should I be looking at doing for the two M.2 options that I have?

I'm guessing the unassigned device can also come into play if/when I start dabbling with VM but I want to get a stable system up and running first.

Thanks everyone.

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  • 1 month later...
On 6/5/2020 at 9:55 PM, AdrianF said:

Okay everyone, pulling everything together carefully and then when picking up my PSU (especially with the shortage at the moment), it's only got (1) 6-Pin PSU to 4x SATA and (1) 6-pin PSU to 2x SATA cable in the box.  I can order the cable from BTOS Integration but because I'm in Canada, I'm looking at about US$25 (or closing in on C$40 after exchange) for the one cable -- yes, US$20 shipping on a US$5 cable.

 

Since I'm picking up an ASRock Rack X470D4U board, I can run M.2 devices on-board instead of relying on a 120GB Kingston SSD I picked up back in January when rebuilding my media server.  Since I'm doing a complete rebuild, I decided it's probably better to pick up a drive or two.

Obviously, having an unassigned device for the Plex Media Library (and metadata) is probably a good start -- this way, things will be zippier.  Not sure how big of a drive or speed I need for this.  Then there's the cache drive that needs to be replaced.  Naturally, as we get more and more into 4K media, file sizes are getting bigger.  120 GB is definitely not sufficient.

From the literature on my board, the following is written:

With this in mind, what should I be looking at doing for the two M.2 options that I have?

I'm guessing the unassigned device can also come into play if/when I start dabbling with VM but I want to get a stable system up and running first.

Thanks everyone.

Some pointers:

  • Having 4k media does not matter if you don't use the cache drive as write cache. Unless you actually need the speed, using a SSD as write cache is rarely ever needed with modern HDDs (and even less with turbo write turned on). The cache drive has evolved quite a bit since the original write cache intention.
  • Having Plex db on a M.2 (NVMe) offers no perceivable additional zippiness. It's not at all "obvious".
  • With the upcoming 6.9.0, multiple pools will be implemented so "cache" is just a pool named cache. (A pool allows btrfs RAID, the array uses Unraid own parity calculation instead of RAID). That would make UD more relevant for removable drives.
  • UD has nothing to do with VM, not sure why you think it would come into play when a VM is involved.

So you need to think of what you want to do with the 2 M.2 slots. And take note that for many of the motherboards, using both M.2 slots will disable a PCIe slot and/or one of the 2 has some speed limitation.

 

 

 

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