Not really. Windows storage spaces sucks compared to Drivepool. Tested them both in a production environment, won't ever go back to storage spaces.dondolarson wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 12:43 amYour software solution overhead CPU, and it sound almost the same as Windows pool management.
Don't think I misunderstood - you mentioned "my plans are to RAID0 both of my current Toshiba P300 3TB drives, split into a couple of partitions to sort and separate bigger files like movies and other "big" media from all "smaller" like "my files" frequently used files, and buy a 6GB drive for backup only." Those are data/program drives yes? They'd benefit from Drivepool and it's solution. I wouldn't ever suggest putting your L2 into some sort of pooled solution.dondolarson wrote: ↑Wed Sep 23, 2020 12:43 amYou must have misunderstand me as I won't put any SSD into RAID... but let's start it once again.
Given the size of those two drives, and the fact they aren't the boot volume, I wouldn't put a L1 cache on them. Just a large L2, and keep your RAM for a L1 on the boot/application drive. So your assumption there was correct - don't try and use RAM for both boot and application/games/data volumes, just your boot volume. Trying to split it between them would mean a lot less cache space for each, and reduce hitrates.
Since your boot SSD will have a good sized L1 on it, it won't need a L2, meaning you can devote all your L2 space to your two spinner drives. Your choice to go either with RAID or a pooling solution - I gave up on RAID a while back after reading some white papers/articles on failure rates and realizing just how easily today's newer/larger drives can trash an array if just one bit doesn't pass parity checks. That's when I started looking at pooling solutions (~6-7 years back) and settled on Drivepool.
As for "..if L2 cache should only be configured to accelerate both HDD partitions, or maybe for accelerating another SSD too?" The answer is: never cache a SSD with another L2 SSD (unless as Support indicates it is much faster). The overhead will kill performance. Natively, there -is- no L1 cache "from a SSD", but with Primocache you can "tier" the two caches against the same volume(s) if you want.
Sounds like you've been lucky with drive failure rates in your career. I've seen quite a few go down, but then I work with clients (both end-users and companies) for all kinds of support, and used to work in a data center. Keeping my drives and data clean is top priority for me, and conventional backups are a must. The reason I use Drivepool and SnapRAID together is that I get the best of all features combined, and amazing flexibility. It's worth taking a look at since you haven't settled on a solution yet, and it has a free trial period I believe.
As an aside: Drivepool has very minimal overhead - it uses the partition's native format (i.e. NTFS) to do reading/writing. The software simply directs the OS to the proper volume depending on the file(s) needed.