u/phido3000

I've ordered some of these for my little 6 bay Asustor nas. I have 4 NVME slots, so two of these isn't a huge ask. I've noticed writes for things like thumb nails are very very slow, and I assume parity thrashing is an issue.

But the files are tiny, but thumbnail preview, you could be generating ~50+ thumbnails all at the same time, all writing tiny little files, reading all over the disk.

Sustained transfers are fast, it can do over 500MB/s. But thumbnails it drops to 1-2MB/s.. I presume caching would help tremendously. Caching both reads and writes. OPtanes are reliable and have long lives. They will operate in Mirror 1/0 mode.

These 16Gb drives are cheap. Like $10 a drive.

Does anyone have any experience with this. I have heard some people having issues with SSD caching.

Ok home Asustor. I am looking for some input.

I have a reasonable home lab, but I am disappointed with my NAS. Its a Asustor Lockstar Gen2 6 6706t.. 6x14tb, 64Gb ram, a 4Tb SSD.. Nice.. Raid 5.

However when doing thumbnails it sucks, very laggy, and really seems to be hit hard with raid 5 thrashing.. My AI image server is pointing to this, so generating hundreds of large many Mb images, and then when trying to view all the mess its making the thrashing for thumbnails. It can take 20-30 seconds to get one thumbnail (but then lots come in pretty soon I assume its creating 10 thumb nails at the same time and not caching writes.).

I was looking at using 2 x 16Gb Optanes as cache (you need two under raid, although it will do Raid5 with 3 - but I want to keep my 4tb NVME as a workspace, and I have 10GbE AQ113 nvme to add 10GbE to it).

I thought the ram would solve my problem, but it doesn't seem to be caching writes, and it doesn't solve the raid 5 problems with small files. Seems great for reads.

Is 2 x 16Gb Optane enough, it would seem to be enough for small files ~30mb, low latency, high endurance. I have some 512Gb PCIE4 NVME I can use, but that seems like a waste for just cache, and honestly I worry about write cycles.. I have loads of ram for network buffering and read buffering, but the write stuff particularly with small files across a 6 drive raid 5 is painful. Sustain writes are fine..

These 16Gb Optane are cheap.. $10 USD delivered. Would this solve my problem and does anyone else use them? While 16Gb isn't that big, its still almost a minute of 2.5GbE bandwidth. So when writing lots of small files intermixed with reads, or thumbnailing etc it would seem to offer a big performance boost. It has lots of ram, the disks are fast, and I have 4tb nvme in there anyway.

Is anyone else using these?