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I want to speed up a setup of 2 existing mirrored magnetic HDs. They currently are in a NAS but I plan to add them locally to the system and use Storage Spaces in mirror mode on them to get the same safety with perhaps a small performance penalty.
Can I extend the array with a single SSD for caching and gain a reasonable amount of performance?
Also, is this somehow fault-tolerant, i. e. if the SSD dies, does the whole (mirrored) array still work and have complete and consistent data and just is a little slower till I add a new SSD as cache?
Or do I have to add 2 SSDs in mirror mode and use tiered storage?
Andreas Reiff
Posted 2016-11-28T15:04:34.813
Reputation: 895
1What if you add the SSD and install Intel's Rapid Storage software, and let that handle the caching? That way, you don't interfere with the array at all. Also, are you sure you need Storage Spaces for such a small system? Especially a NAS? Seems like an overkill to me. – Apache – 2016-11-28T16:07:43.430
Thx. I thought about Intel RST, but I think cache size is limited to 64GB. That is probably ample for 1 PC, but since I plan to virtualize I will likely have a lot more often-accessed data. As for whether I need Storage Spaces.. I don't know. :) Apart from some rather shallow MSDN blog articles I have found little of substance on the topic. – Andreas Reiff – 2016-11-28T18:25:48.690
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Because it is very "enterpricey" so to say. But hey, at least you have info on SU: https://superuser.com/a/567733/16001 || Some other things. 1) There are other third party softwares that allow SSD caching, and that have bigger limits than Intel's. 2) You can always mirror the SSD to a HDD in RAID1 again. In Linux you can use mdadm with "-w" switch. Some raid controllers also allow you to prioritize the SSD. Not sure how many ports you have on a NAS, but at least 4 should be given, even if you use a cheap motherboard.
– Apache – 2016-11-28T20:08:27.883