Hi All, I recently watched the youtube video on StoreMi and wondered whether that or an alternative worked on Linux. Lo and behold it sure does and I came across bcache, dm-cache, LVMCache and flashcache.
Reading on the pro’s cons and difficulties if setting each up I believe bcache would probably suit my situation, but I am still left with a few questions that I cant seem to find any answer to and I hope that here I may get some guidance.
My plan is as follows:
1 x NVME drive to act as boot medium and OS drive
1 x bcache array to act as the /home partition
the bcache array will probably utilise a 2TB 7200 HDD as the backing device, but what I am struggling to work out is what size I should utilise for the caching SSD. I have a 120GB and a 240GB available to hand would either be suitable or overkill (knowing that the cached storage capacity is effectively lost)
Also from what I have read it seems that enabling writeback mode will help with write speeds at the expense of data security, though I don’t have anything overly critical that isn’t backed up anyway. On top of that either increasing the sequential read limit from the default 4M or disabling entirely would yield further improvements to responsiveness.
Are there any other tunings I could do to help this?
And ultimately given my use case for my PC is general purpose use, gaming and some general programming is bcache or such even worth the effort.
I don’t distro hop so I don’t mind effort in getting it up and running.