Primocache, tips, tricks and advice

Context: I have a family member (relatively low income, low technical sophistication, low iq - “I’ll pay you for it” means credit card debt/never) who wanted to blow a bunch of cash on a large SSD (4TB) after I showed him how amazing swapping an old HDD for a 1TB SSD was (gift). I happen to have an old HDD that I’m no longer using plus a 480GB MLC nvme SSD + a PCIe to nvme adapter lying around. He uses the parts for his business so reliability matters more than performance. I’ve already got him backing up everything to a NAS.

  1. If I gifted the above set up, and migrated users/documents to newdrive//documents (and photos and… ) are there any gotchas?
  2. Are there any things that I should mention to explain the set up? Here and now I’m thinking “I have these spare parts lying around, a good SSD and a decent hard drive working together should be plenty fast”
  3. Are there any things I should look into in primocache? Here and now I’m thinking the 480gb drive set to read-write cache on auto for a 3TB SSD, RAM cache, no write deferral, etc.

I used primocache (32gb partition of main ssd) to ‘accelerate’ my old 5400rpm 1.5 tb HD. This is mostly for gaming.

Hence a couple of points:

  1. on a dirty restart all cache in invaldated so it takes a few days for it to get back to up speed.
  2. it just works.
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I’m assuming a dirty restart refers to {power outage, force shut down, crash, etc.}.
This is good to know, I was unaware. I DO have UPS at that house but it isn’t set up.

I suspect that the boxes will be checked reasonably well then.