Add SSD Raid to Pool?

[thepregnantgod]

So I've been doing a lot of work on my pool lately and am reminded that green drives are well...green and slow.

 

So I have about 5-8 extra SSDs laying around that are all 60gb.  I know I could speed up writes if I used the SSD optimizer add-in (files are written there first and then copied to the pool later).  However, these SSDs are small.  When moving a 40gb file, that's basically one/drive.

 

If I were to hook them all up, softraid them via Windows, could I then add say 480gb of raided SSDs to the Pool as the feeder drive?

 

Any problems with this?  Thoughts?

[Spider99]

I have six ssd in my pool and use them with SSD Optimiser and they work fine as singles - admittedly 4x 256 and 2x 512GB

 

What appears to happen is that DP alternates between them - using them in pairs (as have x2 Dup) for each file (think it might be above a certain size - not sure)

 

When they run out of space (copying several Blu-ray rips at once) DP usually falls back to the HDD's of the pool - if you only have a 1g network you probably wont even notice

 

if you do have a 10g network then performance to ssd's is good although its a bit variable on speed (goes up and down a lot during copying - not found whats the cause as yet - have a suspicion or two) but +500GB in one go works fine

 

If you do use SDD Opt - dont have any other plugin turned on other than scanner - otherwise they all fight with each other

 

If you do raid them you will likely lose Smart / probably loose Trim support which will be a problem

[thepregnantgod]

Thanks.  I just bought a 1TB SSD instead.  That way I can copy what I want to the pool and have it rebalance at night.

 

Appreciate the insight though.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

softraid them via Windows,

You mean dynamic disks? 

 

Then no. StableBit DrivePool does not support Dynamic Disks at all. 

 

Storage Spaces or pseudo-hardware RAID (such as intel RST) is fine though. But as Spider99 mentions, you lose out on SMART data.  

Though, if you're using Storage Spaces or intel RST with the newest drivers, you still do get TRIM support. 

 

Thanks.  I just bought a 1TB SSD instead.  That way I can copy what I want to the pool and have it rebalance at night.

 

Appreciate the insight though.

 

Nice.  

 

If you're using duplication, you'd want two disks. Otherwise, one set will be written to the archive disks, slowing things down.  But if you're not duplicating, then you're set.