Blade1001 Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Hi all, Just going through the process of setting up my new unRAID array. Once up and running I was thinking of using an old WD Raptor (74GB) as a cache drive. I know the capacity isn't much given recent drives, but I will only be transferring a single blu-ray rip, or some photo's etc, at a time. Is this drive suitable as a cache drive? Or would I be better looking for an alternative? Being a faster than usual drive, should I be able to get fairly decent write speeds? Cheers in advance... Quote Link to comment
joshpond Posted January 18, 2011 Share Posted January 18, 2011 Hi Blade1001, If it is an old drive like you mentioned and you don't really have a use for it elsewear then it will improve and you should get decent write speeds. Like you said as long as it is only for the one blu-ray you should be fine otherwise you'll hit your drive limit pretty quick. However the only real advantage is if you rip the blu-ray and want to watch it straight away. for me a 40gb rip writes aroun 30Mb/s and probably takes about 20min. I don't know how fast your cache drive will run as there are a lot of variable but lets say you triple the speed (you get close to the limit of GB ethernet) you save 14min. Not much for me so I ditched my cache drive. Josh Quote Link to comment
Blade1001 Posted January 18, 2011 Author Share Posted January 18, 2011 Hi Blade1001, If it is an old drive like you mentioned and you don't really have a use for it elsewear then it will improve and you should get decent write speeds. Like you said as long as it is only for the one blu-ray you should be fine otherwise you'll hit your drive limit pretty quick. However the only real advantage is if you rip the blu-ray and want to watch it straight away. for me a 40gb rip writes aroun 30Mb/s and probably takes about 20min. I don't know how fast your cache drive will run as there are a lot of variable but lets say you triple the speed (you get close to the limit of GB ethernet) you save 14min. Not much for me so I ditched my cache drive. Josh Yeah, thats a good point. I currently get about 20-21MB/sec from my laptop to the unRAID - but I am having to use a USB Gigabit ethernet adapter, as my laptops own ethernet port is only 10/100. Perhaps there's not much benefit in me bothering with a cache drive then. Quote Link to comment
kizer Posted January 19, 2011 Share Posted January 19, 2011 To me honestly Cache Drives are good if you write often and you feel like you need to write fast. Myself I'm a write "now and then" and a "read often" so a Cache drive is/was a rather simple decision to avoid. Quote Link to comment
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