Hey Folks
I am about to build my first NAS and evaluating choices. The h/w is a J1900 mobo with 2x4GB DDR3L I purchased many years back but never used (I just chanced upon it lying in the cupboard) and the HDDs are Toshiba 8+4TB Surveillance drives in JBOD. I got surveillance drives because they are about $80-100 cheaper than NAS drives, my usage is for single person with <5 devices anytime and usage is going to mostly streaming videos, collecting network data exports from my Wifi router using collectd for 24x7 Traffic Monitoring & Analysis, and also serving as a backup device for my desktop. I also got a 16GB Intel Optane ssd with its relatively high TBW compared to SSDs to use as a caching device. The idea is to let bcache convert all random writes into sequential and also speed up random reads using the persistent cache - this should help offset any disadvantages of using surveillance drives optimized for streaming sequential data.
So the question is - Can I initialize the BTRFS HDD as a backing store for bcache using Rockstor? Is there anything that would prevent me from doing this?
While bcache isn’t officially supported by Rockstor, we do have several users who have used it and probably are currently using it; it should thus be recognized by Rocsktor. I personally haven’t tried it, though, but I would point you towards @phillxnet’s notes on it below:
Please note, however, that these notes are now a bit old, and I’m not sure of how much difference (if any) there would be in our new openSUSE base. I would thus point you towards a more recent post by @phillxnet with some bcache mentions of interest:
Hopefully some current bcache users can chip in here to provide their input as this would be more helpful to you.
In any case, good luck with your endeavor, and I hope I was able to at least give you a few interesting bits of information.