Notes based on this excellent Space Invader One video

Where To Store Shares

On Cache (prefer)

  • appdata: houses our docker’s container configuration content
  • domains: houses our VM’s data
  • system: houses our docker’s docker.img and our VM’s libvrt.img

On Array And Cache (yes)

  • downloads

On Array Only

  • any other shares you don’t often write to
    • example: media shares

Share “Use cache disk” Settings

  • No: Only stored on array.
  • Yes: Keep on the cache but also on the array.
  • Only: Only stored on the cache, never moved to the array.
  • Prefer: Will store on the cache, if the cache is full will move to the array. If you do not have a cache drive, will store on the array, and if a cache becomes available the data will move to the cache.

Installing Cache Drive(s)

  1. switch all the shares that you wish to store on the cache drive to Prefer, before installing the drive(s). Its possible this option is unavailable right now. if that’s true, just skip this step and we’ll cover it again later.
  2. shut down the server
  3. physically install your cache drive(s)
  4. boot up the server
  5. stop the array
  6. under “Pool Devices” for each device, click a new slot and select a device from the drop down
  7. start the array
  8. under “array operations” check off the “Yes, I want to do this” under “Format” which will format all unmountable disks, which should be our N new cache drives
    1. Be sure to double check that the disks listed under “Unmountable disk present” are the expected cache drive(s)
  9. If you didn’t do step one, (as it was unavailable), set the shares you want to set to be on the cache now. See the above section for my advice on which shares should leverage the cache.
  10. Stop Docker and the VM service
  11. Click “Move” which will move all the shares intended to be on the cache, on to the cache. We stop Docker and the VM service, as there are many files that cannot be moved when in use. (Settings -> Docker -> Enable Docker set to “no”)

If you installed more than one drive, by default they’ll be in RAID 1, giving you a redundancy incase one disk dies. This is my preferred method instead of increasing performance with striping but losing redundancy

Depending on the size of your shares, this can take a while. It took about 3.5 hours for my ~80 GB of data to be moved to the cache.