Smart Response Raid

[derekullo]

I currently use a 1 terabyte Samsung 840 Evo for windows and games and 5 - 4 terabyte drives in a raid 5 for music and movies, all backed up to a local server running nas4free.

Games and Windows load fast from the ssd and the raid provides ample speed and storage space for movie watching.

While the above configuration works well I am currently at 50% capacity on the 840 Evo and worry about running out of space, I also don't like having 2 drive letters to handle.

A solution for my next build would be to use Smart response to accelerate the raid and hopefully reduce the number of drive letters to 1 for simplicity.

Now for the questions.

1. The Intel Rapid Storage thingy is limited to 6 drives in a raid 0/1/5/10. Does your Smart Response SSD take up one of those spots or is it a totally separate technology?

2. The motherboard I'm looking at, Asus MAXIMUS VIII HERO, disables 2 of the intel sata ports when you use the m.2 port.
6 sata Intel + 2 sata asmedia becomes 1 m.2 + 4 sata intel + 2 sata asmedia
Could i setup the raid using rapid storage with the 4 sata intel + 2 sata asmedia and the m.2 Smart Response ssd?
Is there a motherboard that does not disable 2 of your intel sata when you enable m.2 if that is the case?

2. I know the limit for Smart Response cache is 64 gigabytes, would it make sense to use the remaining space on the ssd to install the OS? I know this goes against what i just said about wanting a single drive letter, but this would "force" the drive to boot from the Samsung 950 PRO 256 Gigabyte. I assume i would just have to carve out 64 gigabytes of the drive for Rapid Reponse before I install the OS on the remaining 192 gigabytes. Would the above work or am i over-thinking this?

3. Part of the last question, how intelligent is the cache'ing algorithm for Smart Reponse? Does it always include the windows boot files? Can I tell it to exclude certain folders so that it does not cache mkv or iso's? If windows has a good enough algorithm to always cache windows files then that would have solved question #2. (I would feel bad throwing away 192 super-speedy gigabytes though)

4. Will Intel ever increase the 64 gigabyte Smart Response limit? I know not all of my games will fit in 64 gigabytes, my Steam library alone wouldnt lol. Is there some reason why that 64GB limit was set? I would feel much better if i could buy a 512GB - 1 TB SSD and use all of it as a cache drive.

5. Has anyone tried a 30 terabyte+ raid with Smart Response?
Is the 0.2% cache effective? 64 gigabytes / 30000 gigabytes
Do you have any other insight that I may be missing?

Thank you for reading.

 

[13thmonkey]

personally I would not reduce the drive letters to 1. Reason being 1 drive letter for OS, 1 (or more) for everything else. If the OS is replaced nothing happens to the other drive letter, it is 'safe'.

For media, you are massively exceeding the read speeds that are actually required, 30-40MB/s of read speed per stream is more than enough (maybe by a factor of 5 or so), so accelerating the media drive is pointless.

I'm 99% sure that an SSD assigned to 'smart response' is wholly consumed as far as anything else is concerned. It's also a cacheing technology, so it is predictive, and media playing is inherently random and unpredictable (unlike program launching).

You are getting to the point where you need a pci-e sata card for more drives...

You are also getting to the point where a general rethink might be beneficial.

 

[derekullo]

I understand accelerating the read speeds for an mkv or any movie is pointless.

In fact one of my questions was if you could exclude those from the cache so they would not be accelerated.

The whole point is to have a single drive letter where all games and windows boot files are accelerated, but cold storage like iso's, blu-rays and 7zip files are not.

I'm currently using about 7 terabytes of space with my current 14 terabyte array.

Moving to 8 terabyte drives and adding another drive would more than double my space so i don't think I'm at the point where a pci-e card is needed.

A pci-e raid card would allow me to use raid 6, which would be a consideration for the future, but i do keep 2 backups of my data, one on crashplan, the other on a local nas4free server.

In the future i may just build out the nas4free server or Freenas into an actual storage device instead of just backup and just use one 4 terabyte samsung 850 evo as my os and games or a samsung m.2 4 terabyte of it exists at that point in the future..

"I'm 99% sure that an SSD assigned to 'smart response' is wholly consumed as far as anything else is concerned. It's also a cacheing technology, so it is predictive, and media playing is inherently random and unpredictable (unlike program launching)."

From what I have read 64 gigabytes is the maximum cache size that you can use. If it does "take-over" the whole drive regardless and only use 64 gigabytes of it then should I buy a 1 terabyte ssd so that the drive endurance is higher?

 

[13thmonkey]

if anything the cache concept will be retired, it was present when the only reasonably priced SSDs were small, now this is not a constraint.

I wasn't referring to a raid card, just a sata card for more disks. I can't help you any more as what you are attempting is outside of filesystems as they currently work. You may be able to choose to cache a set of disks, but not another (virtual or otherwise) but at folder level this may be something that a SAN can offer with tiered storage etc. but you are generating a lot of effort and expense for slightly faster mkvs and not having more than 1 drive letter.

Personally, c:\ OS, d:\data, m:\media, z:\ backups.

 

[derekullo]

Yeah that makes sense.

No point trying to force a file system to do what it originally wasn't designed to do.

With "consumer" ssds up to 4 terabytes now i could just buy one of those and have more than enough space for the foreseeable future for games and os. (Wishing m.2 gets to this size)

The 1 drive thing was more for convenience than necessity.

I guess I just have to learn to live with it lol.

Thank you for the info.

 

[13thmonkey]

I'd also suggest that raid is iffy, raid allows for uptime (can you really not cope with hours without access to mkvs?), backups allow for recovery, so consider a mechanism with less redundancy at source and a backup, this would also be more portable and you would not be reliant on raid setups being replicable across mobo's. Something like storage spaces can offer up the space as a single drive, and be moved between machines running 8.0 onwards.

 

[derekullo]

I do plan on running windows 10 in my future builds.

All of my current pcs are windows 7.

I currently use crashplan to backup to their servers and I also use crashplan to backup to a local nas4free server running a raid 5 with 3 - 8 terabyte western digital reds. Gotta love unlimited backup space on the crashplan servers.