I'm putting together a new Home NAS which will, among other things, be on download duty. I've seen builds around that use a scratch drive to store the temporary files being downloaded, runs processing on the files (parity check) while on the scratch disk, then extracts from scratch to primary storage array.
This sounds interesting in theory as I understand it attempts to save some wear on the main array, and also gets you better throughput on the extraction step (extraction where source and destination drives are different is faster than when they're the same). However, my main array is RAIDZ2 (running with ECC RAM, of course) and as such I think that this means to do it "right" the scratch drive would also need to be a ZFS array? If so, it seems kind of overkill to throw in an additional *two* disks for the benefits proposed by having a scratch drive. Although I guess I could have a single ZFS format drive with copies=2 in order to get error correction?
I wonder what you thoughts are on this idea?
This sounds interesting in theory as I understand it attempts to save some wear on the main array, and also gets you better throughput on the extraction step (extraction where source and destination drives are different is faster than when they're the same). However, my main array is RAIDZ2 (running with ECC RAM, of course) and as such I think that this means to do it "right" the scratch drive would also need to be a ZFS array? If so, it seems kind of overkill to throw in an additional *two* disks for the benefits proposed by having a scratch drive. Although I guess I could have a single ZFS format drive with copies=2 in order to get error correction?
I wonder what you thoughts are on this idea?