A few months ago I had an idea. SMR disks tend to struggle with writes, especially random writes, so what about using an Optane NVMe stick (3DXpoint memory) as an insanely good write cache?
I've configured a pair of 5TB SMR disks as a mirrored pool of disks using Storage Spaces, running on a current build of Windows 10 Enterprise.
I'm trying to figure out how to add additional tiers of disks (happy to use powershell, just unsure what to do), ideally 1x SATA SSD for a Read cache, and my 32GB Optane stick as a Write cache. I figure that makes good use of the PCIe bandwidth I have, while giving me a huge capacity of redundant storage, minus the performance penalties of SMR disks.
I can wipe the disks at any time as this is only a test. I'm not trying to make an enterprise-grade pool here. I recognize I might lose some data from the write cache during an unexpected reboot. I recognize I might gain nothing from this whole expedition. But I figured that for the price of a couple disks, it was a worthwhile venture.
I've configured a pair of 5TB SMR disks as a mirrored pool of disks using Storage Spaces, running on a current build of Windows 10 Enterprise.
I'm trying to figure out how to add additional tiers of disks (happy to use powershell, just unsure what to do), ideally 1x SATA SSD for a Read cache, and my 32GB Optane stick as a Write cache. I figure that makes good use of the PCIe bandwidth I have, while giving me a huge capacity of redundant storage, minus the performance penalties of SMR disks.
I can wipe the disks at any time as this is only a test. I'm not trying to make an enterprise-grade pool here. I recognize I might lose some data from the write cache during an unexpected reboot. I recognize I might gain nothing from this whole expedition. But I figured that for the price of a couple disks, it was a worthwhile venture.