Suitable NVME for cache?

[ianm_ozzy]

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