Newbie SSD Cache Question

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ScottVega

New Member
Aug 6, 2025
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Hi All

After years of using $ynology NAS I want to go a new path (the 2025 restrictions made me finally quite the $ynology realm).
For my Homelab i got a very cheap deal on a HP ML150 G9 with a E5-2660v3 and 160Gigs of RAM. For storage I want to use my four 4TB WD Red drives that are currently in my DS416play. But before I move them, I want to get a bit familiar with Proxmox. For that i got four 1TB SATA HDDs and four 128GB SATA SSDs.
The server will be mostly used for testing and streaming with Plex. Some of the VMs are going to be windows 11 Clients with a Windows Server 2019 Essentials VM running a Database. Eventually I want to install Immich for sorting my picture library.

So here are my questions:
Is there a way, to use those four old SSDs as a cache for the 1TB drives?
Ideally i would have something like a four 1TB RAID5 with those SSDs in a Raid10 Cache to speed things up.
Can this be done easily? I'd prefer not to dive too deep into the command line if I don't have to.

Thanks for your help and not being too harsh on a newbie
:)

Cheers

ScottVega
 
Yes you can use the SSDs as special device or other caches: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS_on_Linux#sysadmin_zfs_special_device

In general you won't have great performance with HDD but the SSDs might make it bearable. Please note that for Performance Mirrors or striped mirrors should be used instead of RAIDZ:
UdoB

[TUTORIAL] Thread 'FabU: Can I use ZFS RaidZ for my VMs?'

Assumption: you use at least four identical devices for that. Mirrors, RaidZ, RaidZ2 are possible - theoretically.

Technically correct answer: yes, it works. But the right answers is: no, do not do that! The recommendation is very clear: use “striped mirrors”. This results in something similar to a classic Raid10.

(1) RaidZ1 (and Z2 too) gives you the IOPS of a single device, completely independent of the actual number of physical devices. For the “four devices, mirrored” approach this will double --> giving twice as many Operations per Second. For a large-file...
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UdoB

[TUTORIAL] Thread 'FabU: This is just a small setup with limited resources and only a few disks, should I use ZFS at all?'

Should I use ZFS at all?​

For once this requires a disclaimer first: I am using ZFS nearly everywhere, where it is easily possible, though exceptions do exists. In any case I am definitely biased pro ZFS.

That said..., the correct answer is obviously: “Yes, of course” ;-)

Integrity​

ZFS assures integrity. It will deliver exactly the very same data when you read it as was written at some point of time in the past.

“But all filesystems do this, right?” Well, there is more to it. ZFS works hard to actively assure the correctness. An...
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