January 18, 201115 yr 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...
January 18, 201115 yr 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
January 18, 201115 yr Author 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.
January 19, 201115 yr 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.
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