Automatically caching certain types of devices...?
Posted: Sat Nov 05, 2022 10:51 am
I'm gonna ramble a bit, but that sometimes ticks people off, so TLDR:
Can I somehow configure PrimoCache to automatically cache any VHD file I mount?
The too long part:
I'm one of those people who can't throw anything away and who hoard like crazy. I have a Linux NAS with 68 TB of storage attached. That storage is 2.5" SMR USB drives, i.e. slow. They're also using NTFS (for cloud backup purposes), so even slower when on Linux.
Because 68 TB is not enough for any true hoarder, I compress as many things as I can. Right now, I'm trying to find a good way to keep all my games stored on this NAS in NTFS VHDs, using LZX compression as this is very efficient. It also speeds up reads, as I now have to read less data over the network and from the slow spindles. However, it's still terribly slow for some of these massive multi-tens-of-gigamabytes games that are normal today.
So, I've been looking for some way to speed up this thing. I've installed trials of this PrimoCache software and of that CloudDrive thing, which is super cool, but it requires me to create one big virtual volume backed by encrypted files, which is okay, except I'm afraid what happens when something gets corrupted. I prefer a little less obfuscation, and PrimoCache seems pretty cool here.
I've tested it with caching iSCSI mounts of a couple of the drives from the Linux box, and it works with this setup. But then I noticed that if I mount a VHD, it too actually turns up as a cacheable device in PrimoCache. So, I can mount a VHD and cache it. It's not that I don't want to use iSCSI, but I have both a gaming laptop and a gaming desktop, and these NAS drives aren't just used for games, so if there was some way to not use iSCSI and instead mount VHDs via Samba, and then automatically have PrimoCache cache that mount, that would be bleedin' awesome.
For the record, it doesn't even have to some kind of GUI thing. I'm a programmer, and I've already written scripts to enable me to run games automatically off VHDs mounted via Samba, so if there's a CLI part to PrimoCache that I could use, that would work as well. The only requirement, of course, would be that - given say, a 500 GB cache device - I can keep cached data from a previous mounting of a VHD for the next time I mount it, so that if I wanna reboot the computer and play the game I just played before, it'll already be cached.
Okay, so I warned you, I'm a ranter. Call me grampa Thanks for any feedback!
Can I somehow configure PrimoCache to automatically cache any VHD file I mount?
The too long part:
I'm one of those people who can't throw anything away and who hoard like crazy. I have a Linux NAS with 68 TB of storage attached. That storage is 2.5" SMR USB drives, i.e. slow. They're also using NTFS (for cloud backup purposes), so even slower when on Linux.
Because 68 TB is not enough for any true hoarder, I compress as many things as I can. Right now, I'm trying to find a good way to keep all my games stored on this NAS in NTFS VHDs, using LZX compression as this is very efficient. It also speeds up reads, as I now have to read less data over the network and from the slow spindles. However, it's still terribly slow for some of these massive multi-tens-of-gigamabytes games that are normal today.
So, I've been looking for some way to speed up this thing. I've installed trials of this PrimoCache software and of that CloudDrive thing, which is super cool, but it requires me to create one big virtual volume backed by encrypted files, which is okay, except I'm afraid what happens when something gets corrupted. I prefer a little less obfuscation, and PrimoCache seems pretty cool here.
I've tested it with caching iSCSI mounts of a couple of the drives from the Linux box, and it works with this setup. But then I noticed that if I mount a VHD, it too actually turns up as a cacheable device in PrimoCache. So, I can mount a VHD and cache it. It's not that I don't want to use iSCSI, but I have both a gaming laptop and a gaming desktop, and these NAS drives aren't just used for games, so if there was some way to not use iSCSI and instead mount VHDs via Samba, and then automatically have PrimoCache cache that mount, that would be bleedin' awesome.
For the record, it doesn't even have to some kind of GUI thing. I'm a programmer, and I've already written scripts to enable me to run games automatically off VHDs mounted via Samba, so if there's a CLI part to PrimoCache that I could use, that would work as well. The only requirement, of course, would be that - given say, a 500 GB cache device - I can keep cached data from a previous mounting of a VHD for the next time I mount it, so that if I wanna reboot the computer and play the game I just played before, it'll already be cached.
Okay, so I warned you, I'm a ranter. Call me grampa Thanks for any feedback!