Cachecade Pro 2.0, still worth using in 2023?

[jcl333]

So I have an LSI 9361-8i with Cachecade pro 2.0.
I am building a R6 array with 6x WD RED PRO 22TB drives.
I have many 400GB enterprise SAS SSDs, write intensive 10 DWPD versions.
My backplane is only 6GB/sec, but I could put them on the controller directly.
Card is 1GB cache version, so max Cachecade is 1TB. So I was thinking 2x400GB in R1 or 4x400Gb in R10.

Of course I can just try it out and see, but wondering what others think if I should even bother with this feature. Broadcom dropped it from more recent cards for whatever reason, maybe because people can now build all-flash arrays without increasing the national debt vs. 10 years ago.

I would appreciate anyone chiming in with their experience. I use it as a general file server with Server2022, hosting ISOs for my home theater and other files, networking is 10Gig. But who knows, would the performance with cachecade be good enough that you could put VMs or something on it as well? That would be interesting. Right now I am going to do that with a larger eSSD that is NVMe.

Thanks

-JCL

 

[azev]

Back when I was using LSI card for my storage server, using cachecade to front end the spinners does help performance quite abit, especially when compared to no ssd cache at all.. I'd say give it a try and see if it meet your expectation.

 

[bandit8623]

From Reading though you cant use drives that are 4kn. have to format them to 512e to be able to use with cachecade. not sure if you lose much doing that.

 

[ano]

its been crap since day 1.

 

[i386]

I use the adaptec/microchip version called maxcache (4.0) on my file/mediaserver.

cache is 2x 200GByte husmm ssds in raid 1, main storage is 22x 16TByte in raid 6.
maxcache statistics say ~30% write hits, 10% read hits
It's not great, but it's also not bad and the cache hit rates would probably increase with more concurrent users