Been using FancyCache for about 4 months and, on my system, it has made a very significant improvement in my various drive performance - and with no issues!
I have added a NAS to my network and removed one of my local drives and installed it into the NAS. This will be my shared "data" drive across my local network. All networked computers are accessing and utilizing the NAS without issue. The NAS drive is mapped as "Z:\" for all computers.
The issue, how do I apply the FancyCache magic to the NAS drive? Of all the drives, this NAS drive needs performance help the most!
Caching a mapped network (NAS) drive
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fsommer1968
- Level 4
- Posts: 27
- Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2011 3:11 pm
Re: Caching a mapped network (NAS) drive
Because of the chosen approach how FC works caching of NAS drives is technical not possible.
Re: Caching a mapped network (NAS) drive
fsommer1968 is correct you can't use FC to cache a NAS. The reason is your NAS is using the SMB protocol (well probably the SAMBA Open Source emulation) to allow you to remotely connect to the NAS's file system, this is completely different from how your OS communicates with a local drive.
That said there is a way to use FC on a network drive but it is purely academic for home users, it's something we use in Enterprise Hyper-V virtualization clusters on 2012 (with low latency, 50Gb network cards). You'll completely lose the benefits you get from using a NAS but it's a fun little exercise (just don't put any important data on it). I encourage you to try just because it's easy and you can learn a little bit about how drives and SMB works (if you read up), but I'll warn you it [probably] wont be any real use to you.
If you are on Win7-8,2008-2012
Open disk manager
In the Action drop down menu choose Create VHD
Create the VHD on the NAS (or any SAMBA/SMB file server)
In the Action menu again choose attach VHD and select the file you created on the NAS.
Now you have a virtual drive on a network share.. =)
That said there is a way to use FC on a network drive but it is purely academic for home users, it's something we use in Enterprise Hyper-V virtualization clusters on 2012 (with low latency, 50Gb network cards). You'll completely lose the benefits you get from using a NAS but it's a fun little exercise (just don't put any important data on it). I encourage you to try just because it's easy and you can learn a little bit about how drives and SMB works (if you read up), but I'll warn you it [probably] wont be any real use to you.
If you are on Win7-8,2008-2012
Open disk manager
In the Action drop down menu choose Create VHD
Create the VHD on the NAS (or any SAMBA/SMB file server)
In the Action menu again choose attach VHD and select the file you created on the NAS.
Now you have a virtual drive on a network share.. =)
Re: Caching a mapped network (NAS) drive
fsommer1968 & dustyny thank you for letting me know ...
dustyny, I did as you suggested, and played around with the VHD approach. That worked perfectly - for one station (as you know). If only multiple users could connect to the same VHD file on the NAS ... Now I REALLY wish FancyCache would work with mapped NAS drives ...
dustyny, I did as you suggested, and played around with the VHD approach. That worked perfectly - for one station (as you know). If only multiple users could connect to the same VHD file on the NAS ... Now I REALLY wish FancyCache would work with mapped NAS drives ...
Re: Caching a mapped network (NAS) drive
If you're interested in learning =) I'd suggest reading up on SMB & SATA, it will explain why a NAS just appears like a drive in the OS but doesn't actually behave like one.
SMB
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block
SATA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA
SMB
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block
SATA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA