SSD accelerated HD-Raid

[Malokos]

Hey Guys,

 

I'm looking to upgrade my current system and that will include an NVME SSD for the boot device as well as some games and such.

 

Now my question mostly lies what to do with my other drives. I'll be getting a 1 TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus, I already have a pretty bog standard SATA 250 GB SSD and 2 WD Blue's with 2 TB.

Since I want to play around a bit and all, I was now wondering whether on an Intel-based system, I'll be able to do something like a Raid-configuration on my HDD's, for redundancy so Raid 1, but accelerate them with my SSD as a cache or something?

 

I'm not sure if I will even go down that route, but I'm just thinking about what to do with stuff, so... I'm open for hints, discussion and all :)

[Oshino Shinobu]

If you have no other use for the SSD and you're using windows 10, you can set up the drives as a RAID 1 and use the SSD to cache them with tiered storage spaces. The caching works pretty well from my experience. The SSD will absorb most small random writes as well, which is where the HDDs would struggle the most. 

 

You might have to read up on storage spaces though, as setting up tiered spaces with RAID 1/mirror by default requires two cache drives and two data drives. In order to use 2 data drives and a single cache drive, you'll have to do it through powershell and manually configure the columns. 

 

Other than that, using the SSD as a standalone drive can be worthwhile if you have some games that you still want to launch fast but don't want to take up space the NVMe drive. 

[Malokos]

Alright, thanks for the fast response

 

Hm... sounds like it would be quite some work, but like I said, I am fine with tinkering around a bit. I'll be looking forward to a weekend of just building a new system, troubleshooting and setting up stuff anyways, lol.

 

I'll look into stroage spaces then and see if I can figure those things out.