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Hi all So my main machine has 2x 256GB nvme for sul boot windows 10/linux and a 1/2 TB nvme for a cache drive. I will be upgrading to windows 11, but the drive is working but out of warranty. So I think I may get the crucial MX500 sata drive for windows 11 - 500GB. Model no: CT500MX500SSD1 Apparently they have much better write endurance and warranty lengths, compared nvme of similar prices. Also it apparently has DRAM cache & a decent slc cache setup. The drive with windows 10 nvme will be put into a server, specifically as an L2arc in truenas scale. When it fails, no data loss! I have some cheap 16GB intel optanes + some pciex1 adapters. they are cheap. I did find this interesting: At 5.13, it shows the crystaldiskmark results. The Q1T1 random 4k reads are 159.43MB/s. That is better than most nand nvmve drives it seems. I already have a primocache personal license. So on windows 11, could have: 1/2TB nvme to cache my games on the NAS ISCSI - doing already. Sata SSD for windows 11 OS only, cached with 16GB intel optane - 4k block size & read only cache. I would like to know who else is doing the optane caching in this way for the OS drive? What is the cache hit rate? Thanks

Hi all So this is not meant a a guide, but to show what I have setup. Copy at your own risk! This hopefully makes sense to those who are presently using Truenas. Some people have games stored on a NAS, now including me. There are various guides to for a setup. My server has proxmox, with truenas scale as a virtual machine. Soon it will be switched over to a truenas scale as the main operating system, and as a hypervisor. IOMMU on the machine has big issues, which mainly why. What purchased for my little project: A very cheap 500GB nvme dirve 2 x 16GB intel optane. Absolutely not buying any storage drives more for now. Why? Multiple ISCSI shares on the server with deduplication, to save drive space. So the truenas scale (virtual) machine has a 5 x 4 TB in RAIDZ1 for storage, with the two 16GB optane drives are for deduplicaton. I tested one on an old machine, to see how deduplication goes deforehand. As expected deduplication was a problem. After a few enquiries the truenas forum, manged to work out how to monitor the deduplication stats & setup an appropriate zvols (types of dicks on zfs) I am not a linux expert and only like use the command line if there is no other option. So I setup: 2 x ISCSI drives on the NAS. The drives have deduplication on. They are both 12TB sparse drives. One windows virtual machine, that updates games on the first ISCSI drive. It has one job, to update games. The second ISCSI has my main gaming PC connected to it. The 500GB nvme is installed there, along with primocche software, setup to cache the ISCSI drive. My second server has a lancache server installed, along with an opnsense router. DNS requests are directed to the lancache server, as defined in opnsense. So in truenas, created the zfs pool. The block size was the issue of the zvols. If small the deduplicaton data (with 16GB) maximum was too high. The workaround was in truenas scale in this: (with knowledge gained through the truenas forum) sudo zfs create -s -V 12TB -o volblocksize=1M <mypool>/blockdirve1 sudo zfs create -s -V 12TB -o volblocksize=1M <mypool>/blockdirve2 For some unknown reason, the 128k is the maximum in truenas, even though zfs allows 1MB. Then is the gui, navigate to the created datasets, turn on compression & dedup. Oh and disable sync. The reason is to reduce the needed dedup data. The defult block size is 16k. I went to 1M. It means a 64 x reduction in the dedup data. To get the data to show if performing as expected used (with knowledge gained through the truenas forum): admin@truenas[~]$ sudo zpool list -v [sudo] password for admin: NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT Main-Pool 18.2T 11.5T 6.70T - - 0% 63% 1.98x ONLINE /mnt raidz1-0 18.2T 11.5T 6.69T - - 0% 63.2% - ONLINE 439d52b5-7141-4607-ba41-e7b814039b4e 3.64T - - - - - - - ONLINE 94c2caff-ed31-40b3-bd34-0a0ecee46b62 3.64T - - - - - - - ONLINE 897a35d4-f6f9-4370-bd8a-5df84b8670d1 3.64T - - - - - - - ONLINE ce546fb1-c7c3-4ff1-b6da-0de13e53e74b 3.64T - - - - - - - ONLINE f28a79fd-9046-4bad-b4ee-8b506bfffd9b 3.64T - - - - - - - ONLINE dedup - - - - - - - - - mirror-1 13G 3.02G 9.98G - - 59% 23.2% - ONLINE 0f12fd17-752e-494c-a976-e8fb20c207e7 13.4G - - - - - - - ONLINE 4389d266-b292-47f9-9d08-1d38b54ba224 13.4G - - - - - - - ONLINE boot-pool 39G 2.65G 36.3G - - 0% 6% 1.00x ONLINE - sdb3 39.4G 2.65G 36.3G - - 0% 6.79% - ONLINE admin@truenas[~]$ Apologies if not formatted correctly. The two relevant pieces of data are DEDUP - 1.98. Yay it means the block devices are not doubling up of space usage. Also the dedup data itself. 3.02GB. The games presently use up about 3.5TB. A great ratio in my opinion. There is also other data on the nas, shared through samba. Little of this was available through the gui, which was another cause of frustration. On the windows machine, both the virtual one and gaming one, I formatted the ISCSI drive using 1MB block sizes. Some games can be inefficient with space due to using many small files, but the compression on truenas deals with that. It took longer than expected, mainly due to having to work out how to use the command line options in truenas So what happens. Overnight the windows virtual machine typically updates games. The game updates are stored in the lancache server. So turn on my gaming machine & steam starts. Game updates go fast - present limit is 1 gigabit It would be straight forward to install the lancache in the main server with 2.5Gb speed, but very few games seem to update that fast My internet speed is 100 megabit. That is the fastest option there will be for a while. Game updates themselves are written to the 500GB NVME through primocache. Deferred writes are turned on, with the 300 second option. Also very fast. Now are glad it is setup & working as expected. I setup a periodic snapshot for the PC games ISCSI drive, every week, deleted after a month. If there is severe corruption,will roll back. Also all my games are backup up/sunced to external drives about one a week. Apparently some think this could have been done on proxmox. No guides I can find! If there is please let me know, that is with minimal/no command line stuff. I could probably be done through other means also. This post is partly for my benefit, but hope it is useful to some. So to sum up, in truenas the command line options I has to use were: sudo zfs create -s -V 12TB -o volblocksize=1M <mypool>/blockdirve1 sudo zfs create -s -V 12TB -o volblocksize=1M <mypool>/blockdirve2 Above tow lines to create the block devices, as 1MB block size option is presently not in the truenas gui. Also: sudo zpool list -v It is to show the deduplication info and other information about a storage pool. I hope this is useful to some. Useful & positive feedback is appreciated.

Hi all. So the purpose of this post. I am soon going to be upgrading one of my servers. The is a truenas core virtual machine running. I intend to install true scale instead with: 5 x 4TB hard drives in raidz1, with 2 x 16GB intel optane for deduplication. I will setup two ISCSI devices connecting 12TB (maybe more) sparse drives. One is to connect an ISCSI device to a windows virtual machine. The drive will have all my games copied over. Its only job will be to update games. A proxmox lxc container in my smaller server has a lancache server. Details of it can be found here: https://lancache.net/ The lancache is software can be installed on I think any linux OS. It is typically used for large gaming lan parties, but I use on a much smaller scale. My main PC will connect to the second ISCSI, running & playing games off that. Gaming would be sluggish doing that alone. I have a PCIE 3.0 adapter and will be adding another nvme as a cache drive. I use primocache software. I have used it for a while and its works well. It is suited to block storage, such as caching a hard drive, or for me an ISCSI share. The idea is: Games will be updated in the background through the windows virtual machine on the server When updating, will probably be cached, so download much faster from lancache server. Writes to the server will also be fast, as the deduplication means little actual writes to the drives as the same data is stored already. The bottleneck if any, will be the network, which is 2.5Gb. I want to get a 500 - 512 GB NVME PCIE 3.0 drive for a cache. Which one to get though? There are some fairly cheap ones. It will be hit fairly hard, so my thoughts are a decent quality one with DRAM & SLC caching. If I go super cheap, it may not last long. Also I do not want to spend a lot. Maybe a long warranty is an indicator? Suitable suggestions are appreciated. Thanks

Hey All, So to start this is my current PC https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/b/HBw6Mp I'm wondering what the best solution for a speedy, large capacity game drive is? Currently my games are stored on a 1TB 2.5" SSD but that is quickly filling up. I've heard of AMD StoreMI and PrimoCache but don't really know a whole lot about either. I've heard StoreMI has limitations and can be a bit clunky though. Are either of them any good? Or does anyone have any other solutions? Ideally I am looking for something similar to Optane. I'm hoping to have like a 10TB HDD wtih some sort of cache so that its still quick if that makes sense.

Hey how we doing, today i tried dedicating 32gb of my 64 gb ecc ddr3 1866 ram to cache my ssd raid 5 drive that's on a P420i raid controller for which i do not know the devices onboard cache size in order to speed up my gaming. its a used hp ml350p gen 8 from my office that has two 15mb xeon 4 core 3.5ghz cpus yes i realize it would be better off with one 6 core 30mb 3.5 ghz cpu but at the time there wasn't any available. Back to the topic the riad 5 is 8 all san disk plus 250gb ssd', though my fps is good and i can for sure play with 3 friends on my machine i thought after a few reboots and launches of the games my fps would increase yet it did not actually become worst. Now im not sure why my fps dropped 35% i was wondering if i did not do the settings correctly as i could not come across anyone trying to cache ram for their raid ssd maybe for obvious reasons but im not an expert. what should i do thanks in advance

Hi there! Recently I set up a Parity Storage space consisting of 4 1TB + one 2TB HDD, for a total of 3TB usable capacity, in my dad's PC and mapped it as a network drive to the rest of our devices. The objective was to have a central backup storage location and share media files in the household. Aside from a lower-than-expected capacity, it works as intended, but the write speed s u c k s. I have a spare 500GB SSD that I want to combine with it to accelerate it and create a small tiered solution. Question is, what would be the best way about it? Option 1: Tiered Storage Spaces The machine is Windows 10 Pro, so it would require Powershell wizardry, but it can be done. I would have to offload around 2TB of data first and dismantle the current Storage Space (I assume), but I have the spare capacity on external drives. Option 2: Primocache The idea is to combine the "single drive" - Parity Storage Space - and the SSD. I'm not sure it would work, but it could be easier and without hassling with Powershell. Paid solution dependent on software Option 3: Stablebit Drivepool Same as Primocache, possibly more robust in terms of setting up the drive pool from scratch. Paid solution dependent on software Option 4: StoreMI Right now the PC is based on Intel Z77, but a Ryzen 3600 upgrade is planned for around the end of the year. What would be your recommendation?

Greetings and Happy New Year to All! Back in the day before SSDs were common there were intelligent defragmentation/fragmentation tools that would sequence your drive sectors intelligently so they would read in sequence on Windows Startup. I am working on my Son-in-Laws system and the HDD is extremely slow with Windows 10 taking upwards of 3-5 minutes before it finally finishes thrashing the drive. I've cleaned up the software as much as possible and am now looking at other options. Planning to purchase an SSD and a Primocache License for his Birthday but that isn't until the fall. In the meantime I wouldn't mind investing in an intelligent defragmentation tool to tide things over. Does anyone know of any current software that does this? I know they existed back in the day but when web searching these days I am weary of all the scam/fake products out there. A portable installer would be a bonus as I can add it to my technician toolbox but not required. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Alternatively, I may consider a ram upgrade in the meantime for him and then grab primocache early for ram caching. Does primocache store this data on the HDD to be reloaded for a quick startup or is it a blank cache that repopulates once the system has started? In the second case it isn't worth the thought then. Thank-you for any advice in advance and Happy New Years! (Happy Birthday to me as well heh)

Hi guys,I recently bought a 120Gb ssd and use it as my boot drive.I have 1 Tb hard disk for my game library.I want to accelerate my game drive. I have heard about StoreMI technology recently, but since i have an i7 i cant use store mi and research tells me i can use either primocache or intel RST.I heard both technology uses caching to improve HDD speed but isnt caching(writing again and again) bad for the ssd?.What are the disadvantages of using the technology?If there is none which one is better in your experience?

I was thinking about buying a 2 TB HDD and using an SSD and Primocache to cache it, so Windows and all my data and programs would be stored on the hard disk. I plan to use the PC mainly for gaming, so I hope to load often used games fast although they are stored on the hard disk. Is it correct to assume that most of the time the loading speed is the one of the SSD (including Windows startup)? Would you recommend doing this? What are possible downsides? Which SSD size is recommended? Is Primocache the way to go or are there any better (possibly cheaper) options?

I'm trying to use a 120 GB SSD as cache for 3x 1TB HDDs. I'm considering StoreMI, PrimoCache and maybe others. I want to keep my drives and the partitions on them as they are (as opposed to fusing them into one drive), and I wanna have it in a config where I can just remove the SSD and nothing would fail. Meaning, I don't want the system to become dependent on the cache. My boot drive is a TB NVMe, this is just for additional drives. Which software can accomplish that? How would I go about setting that up?

Hello, I would like some help learning about the limitations of PrimoCache's maximum ssd size, for some background I was planning to upgrade to x570 and the ryzen 3000 series that will be coming sometime next year so I would get a faster cpu and get store mi, the problem with store mi is that it's maximum ssd size is 256gb. Then Linus did the video showing off store mi and then mentioned how much better PrimoCache is, my question is what is PrimoCache's maximum ssd and hdd sizes it can use. I was planning to use a 6tb X300 Toshiba hdd and I'm thinking about going with a 500gb 970 Evo now that I wouldn't be limited by the ssd size. Would that work? Do you think a 250gb 970 Evo would be plenty?

I have an intel optane 32 GB ssd, with their intel rst software, but I was wondering if I should maybe switch to primocache or something else? I am referring to this video from 2018, but a lot of things can happen between that time and now, so was wondering what cache-solution is the best in 2020? So, what would be the best solution for me to use with an HDD(only for games, but not my main games, those are on a ssd..)

Hey guys, I'm considering getting PrimoCache for a 2TB 7200RM Seagate Hard Drive I'm going to get for games, particularly FS2020. Unfortunately, my beefy GPU covers both PCIe slots, so I won't be able to install a PCIe to M.2 expansion card and use a 256GB NVMe SSD for my cache. My question is, how much is the performance loss from an NVMe SSD to a SATA SSD for such a task? I could use some of my 1TB NVMe Windows Drive for my cache, but since it's almost full I really would rather avoid this. Thanks for the help!

I'm currently using a 200GB partition of my main windows 1TB NVMe SSD for my level 2 cache using primocache. I read that this will stress the drive more, which makes sense, since it's going to be reading and writing frequently. Is this going to significantly reduce the lifespan of my boot SSD? I really want to be careful with this as that's my main drive and if it dies early my entire PC goes down. If yes, I'll just grab a small SATA SSD and use it as an L2 cache instead.

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