Have the SSD handle small files?

[Fredrick]

Hi!

 

I'm currently working on rebuilding my pool after 3 drives tanked within few days (fan-failure caused them to go too hot I think). I'm adding a couple of 8tb Archive drives, and an 240gb SSD for write-cache with the SSD-optimizer.

 

The Archive drives does handle sequential reads and writes pretty well, but I've got tons of tiny files. Media library with .jpg of every actor and .nfo for each episode etc. I suspect having these files stored on the SSD would be a good way of giving the archive drives an easier task. They have poor IOPS performance.

 

Any easy way to configure that files <150kb are stored on the SSD or something similiar?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well. it handles sequential reads fine, but sequential writes are an issue.  As for lots of small files, it depends, but yeah, it may be less than ideal. 

 

 

And no, there isn't a way to do that currently. However, you can use the File Placement Rules to create rules based on extension type.  

 

For instance:

"*\POSTER.JPG"

"*\*.NFO"

 

These should get any "poster.jpg" and "[filename].jpg" file in any folder. 

 

 

 

But this does require you to know the extensions of the files, and to create multiple rules. 

And if you're using the SSD Optimizer and File Placement rules, you need to disable the "Unless a drive is being emptied" option in the Balancer's main settings. 

 

 

 

Additionally, if you are using duplication here, there are a couple of things to note. 

• The SSD Optimizer needs 2+ drives to gain the speed benefit, otherwise it WILL fall back onto non-SSD drives. But this only applies to folders with duplication. 
• When duplication is enabled, the Read Striping feature optimizes access. If one disk is busier, it will read from the less busy disk. It can also read from both, to gain a slight increase is speed.