2 cache drives

[mrbilky]

So I have my box running pretty good for a beginner (bought a key tonight) and I am going with 3 4TB hard drives and the question I have is I have one of those pice x1 ssd cards which provides me 2 additional options 1 2.5 ssd and 1 sata connector for whatever I choose I currently have a 1 TB 2.5 hdd drive from a laptop upgrade mounted on the card and my cache drive ssd on the sata connection would it be more advantageous to ditch the 1TB drive and have 2 240GB ssd's as cache drives will it provide any more performance over the little space lost by the hdd? And I hate looking at the pcie x16 slot sitting empty is there something you folks would recommend to occupy that slot for a NAS setup either for performance or upgrade, mind you I have 2 scratch built rigs a Ryzen R5 1600x and my daily driver is an R7 1800x both have 1080's in them and my daily drive is a triple monitor setup so I don't think a GPU is needed in the NAS

 

[tdallen]

Hi -

 

An x1 card is pretty bandwidth limited, you could hit throughput issues with 2 SSDs depending on the PCIex revision of the motherboard and card.  As to whether it would be advantageous to have 2 SSDs as cache instead of the 1TB drive, it really depends on what you want to accomplish.  The SSDs are faster, draw less power, and can offer redundancy in a BTRFS pool, while the 1TB drive is larger and isn't subject to any of the write/erase concerns of SSDs.  In my case pretty much everything that touches my cache drive is running unattended so it doesn't matter how fast it is.

 

The most typical uses of an x8/16 slot in an unRAID server are a SATA controller, a graphics card for VMs with hardware pass-through, and 10GB network cards.  Don't feel bad about leaving it empty, though - anything you put in there will draw power and increase your baseline power utilization/cost.