Romex Software Forum

Hello everyone!
I am trying to figure out what is the best way to accelerate my data on a RAID 6 array.

Should I connect the 500GB SATA SSD to the RAID card or the motherboard? I mean which port? Both are 6Gbps capable. But my concern is that if I connect the Primocache SSD to the RAID array's free port, won't the RAID card's own cache come in play first?

Here is the current configuration of my home server:

• Supermicro motherboard X11SSL-F
• Xeon processor E3-1225 v6 3.30 GHz 8M cache
• 32 GB RAM
• Mellanox Fiber Channel network card 25Gbps SFP running at 10gbps
• Dell PERC H730p withe 2GB battery backed cache
• 6x4TB Toshiba N300 NAS drives in RAID6 (SATA)
• Windows 10 Pro

Thanks!
-Raj

Any thoughts?

The fastest one.

rajdude wrote: ↑Tue Mar 28, 2023 6:22 pm Should I connect the 500GB SATA SSD to the RAID card or the motherboard? I mean which port? Both are 6Gbps capable. But my concern is that if I connect the Primocache SSD to the RAID array's free port, won't the RAID card's own cache come in play first?

So what's wrong with that? The 2GB of RAM on that RAID controller is split between all the data access. Small cache all in all... and useful to SSD too.
However, you seem to have enough RAM, I would put the SSD, that you want to use as cache, on the motherboard controller as L2 and add some L1 RAM cache to it (maybe 4-8 GB). Maybe allocate more L1 for writes, to protect the SSD.

Thank you for your advice and sorry for the late reply. I just noticed that I was not subscribed to this thread. I guess I have to do it manually.


So yeah, I have been playing around with the trial version of PrimoCache.
I have given PC 14 GB RAM as L1 cache, split 50-50 between read-write
250 GB SSD is on the motherboard's SATA port
L2 cache on SSD is split 50-50 between read-write
Defer write enabled, and latency is set to 10 seconds
This system is on a reliable UPS

So far, I have not seen an increase of speed in my particular use case - which is trying to speed up file shares (network access). Yes it does speed up local file read-write (to around 9.5 Gbps), but somehow the file share speed remains the same, seemingly capped at 2 Gbps. I have been troubleshooting that for a long time. I do not think it is PC's fault, either the NIC or the OS or some setting is out of whack.

update:
I found out the problem I was reporting above. The tool I was using for benchmarking - LAN speed test has some limitation in it. Hence the 2Gbps max reported by it.

If I use robocopy, I can push much more data through my 10gbps network.

@rajdude, thank you for the update!