I’m planning on using a spare 120GB SSD as my cache drive, and pair it with my 4TB WD Black (though part of me wants to pair it with 2TB Barracuda instead for less hassle because it’s currently unused).
My current plan is to put most of my games (and maybe videos) on the drive paired with an SSD, & have my /home directory go to the non-cached drive.
I have read about Bcache, and was wondering if it’s good for my plans? And is this guide up-to-date?
Bcache works well, and LVM’s native caching function does as well. In my experience, bcache has slightly better performance, but that’s a very subjective assessment without any testing or tuning behind it.
I think the layout you propose won’t give you a lot of benefit, since most of the heavy lifting happens from /home anyway.
I’d suggest creating a boot partition, and a 20-50GB / filesystem on the SSD for system and boot speeds. Then, use the remaining SSD space as your caching partition with the HDD as the backing device for your /home filesystem.
I have been using Bcache for a year now and it works without any issue. (I am essentially a beginner in this, only started to seriously using Linux 2 years ago). That guide will probably work without problems, there haven’t been any changes on the surface.
I have also tried LVM cache but I ran into some problems when I did my setup, and beeing new to this I just tried bcache and it worked first try. Maybe it was only a fluke but at the time I had even less of an idea what I was doing than now.
I am also in the process of trying ZFS, as I understand it is the only way currently to get multiple storage tiers. Maybe someone can correct me on that.
I second that, it’s essentially my current setup and it works very well.
ooookayy …
Do you have /home in a separate partition? Otherwise that will also be in / (I guess you know that, I sometimes forget). You must have a lot of software installed, I use about 40G of my root partition and thought I have a lot of software .
/home is currently in a separate partition. If I remember correctly, I have at least 2 games in /opt because of them being higher priority, but I’m gonna have to check.
And don’t worry. I’m not offended. I tend to treat others like noobs, even though I know they know almost as much or more than me, half the time because I have a bit of trust issues.
Your comments just gave me an idea. I also have a SSD Plus 480GB SSD that’s might be replaced this Christmas with a much better model (hopefully a 860 Evo or MX500). Since I have 2 HDDs, think I could partition around 220GBs a piece for both of them?
Backup your data to another location, Then you could install / on the 4TB drive as lvm , dont create any other LVs or partitions. Just install / on the 4TB drive… then after install is done. reboot. expand VG with the ssd, Setup lvmcache and cache the root LV.
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