Add SSD drive(s) to RN528X

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jimk1963 wrote:

1) Will replacing 1 or more HDD's with SSD speed up performance? Especially write speed

2) In order to see an SSD benefit, how many SSDs MINIMUM do I need to swap in?

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Generally speaking, your RAID performance would be limited by the slowest disks in the array.  So this would not be a good strategy.

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jimk1963 wrote:

3) Can I swap in SSD(s) to act as cache, or only what I guess is NTGR's proprietary "tiering"? How many SSD's do I need for this???

Your options are to use ReadyTier, or to re-build your system so it has two independent volumes (for instance, a RAID-1 SSD volume and a RAID-5 or RAID-6 mechanical disk volume).  Either way you'll need to destroy the existing volume (and reload the data).

For ReadyTier, you should have RAID redundancy, so you'd need two SSDs.  They wouldn't need to match the size of the mechanical disks.

FWIW, I haven't seen many posts here from ReadyTier users.  Hopefully some will chime in.

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jimk1963 wrote:

 

4) RN528x motherboard contains an SSD slot on its backside, unpopulated. I wonder - if I populated that slot wth the m.2 SATA III SSD, would the motherboard use that SSD as cache? Or would it just be ignored? 

 

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There's been a couple of other folks here who've wondered about using that slot.  But I haven't seen anything from someone who has used it.  I'd be surprised if the ReadyNAS software uses it automatically.

I doubt that the slot will take m.2 SATA though.  More likely it is nvme.