Raid 0 with ssd cache

dh465 · April 13, 2020

Iv seen this has been asked before but the answer didn't suite my situation.

So I want to put 5 2tb Seagate barracuda in raid 0 for games with a 500gb nvme Samsung Evo 970 as ssd cache.

My question is does windows need to be installed on the raid 0 hdds? Or can I simply boot off of a second ssd for windows and have my raid 0 plus nvme cache as my D drive?

Side thought does raid 0 scale linearly? Ie 5 drives are 5x faster? Or does it drop off quickly like sli?

dh465 · April 13, 2020

Another side thought.

Does ssd cache size matter much? I assume bigger is better so it will have to re cache less often?

I'm way out of my area of expertise, all advice is welcome.

Electronics Wizardy · April 13, 2020

Depends on what software you want to use for caching. If you use storage spaces in windows, you can't have any drives as the boot drive. Primo cache lets you use a partition on the boot drive as a cache.

4 minutes ago, dh465 said:

Side thought does raid 0 scale linearly? Ie 5 drives are 5x faster? Or does it drop off quickly like sli?

Depends on the use, but you get pretty good scalling for 5 drives normally. Will games load much faster, not really, raid doesn't make access time that much faster, and your going to get limited by other things in load times aswell.

But if you goal is game load times, id just try to get a big ssd instead of lots of cached hdd.

foldingNoob · April 13, 2020

3 minutes ago, dh465 said:

Side thought does raid 0 scale linearly? Ie 5 drives are 5x faster? Or does it drop off quickly like sli?

Someone somewhere on the internet has tested this. I think performance starts to slide after three drives. Sorry I can't find where I saw this.

NewMaxx · April 14, 2020

There's two possibility: caching, where incoming writes go to the SSD before being later distributed to the HDDs and tiering, where a heatmap will distribute data for reads based on usage. Plenty of tools for both including free ones like Storage Spaces in Windows 10 (PowerShell gives you flexibility). Plenty of paid as well, like FuzeDrive, DrivePool, PrimoCache, etc. It's even possible to RAID the tiers - I have 2x120 SSDs in stripe in a tiering structure with 2x1TB HDDs vs SS, for example. On my one server I use DrivePool to use a 256GB MLC drive to cache for 12TB of HDDs. Etc.