Romex Software Forum

Folks, I've recently updated my gaming pc, and I want to also have it act as my plex server. I want to incorporate tiered storage, but my knowledge of this caching technology is extremely limited.

I have multiple large mechanical hard drives: 2x8tb, 1x5tb, and 2x3tb. I also have several SSDs: 1x 970 evo plus NVMe, 2x 850 Evo Sata 500gbs.

What I would like to do is use Windows Storage Spaces to create two different storage pools. One would be for all of my media on Plex, movies/tv/music, and would likely consist of the 2x8tb drives and perhaps the 5tb drive (may get rid of it and get another 8tb so I can use the "parity" option which is similar to raid 5. The 2x3tb hard drives would be the second storage pool which I would use to house games.

From there I would like to use the two 850 Evo SSDs as fast tier caching solutions, one for each HDD storage pool. I would use PrimoCache, or a similar solution. I may also dedicate some ram to caching (2-4gb).

The 970 evo is my boot drive and would stay as such.

I have a few questions if anyone can help.

1) REFS vs NTFS? In the above situation, are there advantages/disadvantages to formatting the drives in REFS vs NTFS?

2) What should the sector sizes be?

My thought is that for the media storage pool, it may be beneficial to use the largest sector size available given that the vast majority of the files are large video and audio files. I would then also be able to use a larger cluster size for the caching I presume.

For the game storage pool, what are peoples thoughts? Should I use the 4k default sector size? And what about cluster size for the caching? Anyone have any best practices to balance ram overhead and performance when using for games?

3) Is PrimoCache/StoreMi going to completely fill up the SSDs? If so, does it make sense to partition off part of it, or only allocate 80% of it? I've heard that these drives slow down to the speed of frozen molasses when they are 90%+ full.

4) Read caching vs Read/Write? Can someone illuminate the benefits or write caching (if any) for my use case? Does it make the most sense to simply use Read only?

5) Ram Caching? Can anyone please help me understand the benefit of doing so? I believe the ram gets flushed upon turning off, so would this help load times only if I play a game multiple times between shutting down?


Sorry for the many questions. For reference my system is as follows:
CPU: Ryzen 3800x
MOBO: Asus X570
GPU: 1080ti
Ram: 32gb Corsair 3200mhz
Storage described above.

1. REFS + Storage Spaces is a risky solution - there are cases where together they disgracefully degrade with not much hope of data recovery. I'd stick with REFS alone, or Storage Spaces + NTFS.

2. It depends how much RAM can you sacrifice for overhead (personally I avoid overhead being bigger than RAM cache ). If plenty, with NTFS I'd go with 4k. And I'd keep in line filesystem & PrimoCache sector sizes.

3. Depends on an SSD. If you want to keep them as fast as possible and healthy I'd leave ~10% unpartitioned.

4. For media I'd leave it read only, or not cache it at all... For games I'd make it R/W (with Write one not larger than your largest game) - they receive updates, sometimes maintain some temp files, etc.

5. RAM is faster than SSD. Useful especially for writes (but also dangerous). Windows itself has 2 seconds write cache and uses free RAM as read cache. PrimoCache can keep RAM cache on shutdown but then it makes shutting down and powering up longer (it then gets written/read to/from hiberfil).

I'd recommend ditching Storage Spaces completely. Go with a professional 3rd party solution like Stablebit Drivepool. I use it on a large server (72TB) at my home office and it's excellent software.