SSD cache as a working drive

[robertoal]

Hi there! First time user of DrivePool, and it looks promising. Before i purchase the software.. I have some questions.

My use case:

Photography -> 128gb of .nef (45mb a piece) files weekly. (using mostly Lightroom and Photoshop)

I want to use the cache to offload the files quickly, and when de cache drives become full it to moves the oldest files to the archive drives making space for new projects.

During the period of which the files reside on the cache disks I want to retain data redundancy (duplication) on the cache drives, but want to utilise the performance benefit of editing from the SSD drive's.

 

Questions:

1. What kind of 'raid' is DrivePool using in the background with four disks? I hope it to be the raid 10 because of the speed benefits and retaining redundancy

2. Is my use case possible with DrivePool? It only seems to do the cache thing, where if the drives fill up above a certain % it moves ALL the files to the archive disk, I would want it to only move the oldest files (on which i will probably be done editing).

 

Can someone please help me get the right settings to achieve my goal?

Thanks in advance!

 

Hardware storage:

3x 4tb wd drives

1x 2tb wd drive

4x intel 160gb SSD (256 mb read/128mb write, so quite slow but in a RAID 10 config it should be sufficient )

[robertoal]

I think i can answer question number 1 now:

No, can't do raid 0 -> it isn't build for this purpose. (de striping bit)

Solution: RAID10 on wtih the motherboard controller! (is faster than the Storage Spaces solutions like 2way mirror) RAID 10 ssd pool now used as a cache drive.

Only question 2 remaining!

[nauip]

Q1 - Drivepool isn't RAID, it's JBOD with awesome features.

Q2 - I don't think it can/will do this. As far as I can tell, once the SSDs are full to their limits or if you use the scheduler it will just empty the SSDs. Others might have figured out what you are asking and likely know better.

 

edited to add: 

 

This guy seems to be on to something.

Edited June 9, 2019 by nauip
new info available.