Smurf's monster 40TB unRAID NAS build [Part II]

Smurfin

A cache drive is a waste of a drive slot imho, it's a false economy.

Dan201

Would it speed things up in the same way it would in a regular pc?

U can spare a drive slot smurf!

saguk1234

The cache drive wont speed up anything. The cache drives sits outside the protected array and thats what speeds up the write speed. However it will have to write to the portected array eventually and thats where the speed will be slow. You can schedule the write during the night. I would rather use the slot for a data drive than a cache drive!

Dan201

Fair enough, it was worth checking. I think ive nearly chosen my components, thanks to your thread.

BlairLoch

I wouldn't be without mine. My sabunzbd downloads run on it, allowing the rest of the hard drives to be spun down. Saves a whole lot of power. This can also be achieved using a drive outside of the array, not assigned to the cache function mind you.

Dan201

Unraid spins all unused drives down anyway doesn't it? How do u keep a drive out of an array?

Its the software side of making a server im most worried about.

Smurfin

That's the bit that's done for you, the O/S is fully functioning and easy to install

Re: a drive being outside of the array.  In the unRAID web gui, you can allocate a drive as being "cache", and the software excludes this from the array.

I had a cache drive initially and never used it, as I didn't see the point of doubling up transfers to the server, which is effectively what it does.  I only use my server for storage though, not downloading.

Dan201

Im not sure im going to use unraid yet, you mentioned before that the speed's weren't that great. Is that because its a software raid solution rather than hardware?

And would downloading onto the array spin up lots of drives?

Smurfin

Speed for what, reading or writing? Writing is slow but that's largely irrelevant for use as a media server, whereas write speed is fine - I can stream 3 uncompressed blurays simultaneously

This isnt raid though, its better

Smurfin

Just to add, downloading to a drive will spin up 2 drives - the drive you're writing to and the parity drive