Cache Drive working in ZFS Pool?

[djlax152]

Hi guys, I have a ZFS pool of 4 drives and an additional drive as a cache, I was using a 10k rpm drive for the cache which wasn't all that great in terms of a performance boost so I decided to replace the cache drive with an SSD drive 64GB. So I decided to connect the old 10k drive to my computer to see if there was any data on the drive because i had a feeling it wasn't even being used by my ZFS pool. When i connected the drive and it came up in explorer I saw that it had 100% free disk space. Does this mean that my cache drive was never even used at all? I think maybe windows can't see the files on the cache drive but it should at least be able to see that there is some data on the disk right? I'm asking this question because now that i invested a little bit of money for an SSD drive I wanted to at least be sure it is being used. Is there another way i can check to see if My Cache drive is actually working?

 

[cyberjock]

No, windows doesn't acknowledge the disk file system. Additionally, the drive has no real "file system" because it was stored in RAM when the system was up. If you don't understand the details of how an L2ARC works you probably threw away money buying it.

Hint: If you aren't using iscsi or a huge 10+GB database AND have lots of RAM in your computer expect little or no performance increase at all.

 

[djlax152]

No, windows doesn't acknowledge the disk file system. Additionally, the drive has no real "file system" because it was stored in RAM when the system was up. If you don't understand the details of how an L2ARC works you probably threw away money buying it.

Hint: If you aren't using iscsi or a huge 10+GB database AND have lots of RAM in your computer expect little or no performance increase at all.

Thankfully i didn't spend a lot of money on it, I'm trying to read up on the L2ARC now. I added the SSD CACHE because i was experiencing a lot of Lag when browsing through my directories (via my CIFS Share) in windows. Sometimes I browse through my folder structure with no problems but more often than not I experience long pauses to advance to the next folder while browsing my files. I've had plenty of cases where the windows explorer process will lock up and have to be restarted. I have no issues browsing though my directories on local disks and i've tried with 3 different laptops and I only experience the lag when I am browsing my CIFS share from my freenas box. I thought maybe the SSD drive would maybe cache a few of my files and help speed this up a little but maybe I am misunderstanding this whole thing. Anyways Thanks for the Reply Cyberjock!

 

[cyberjock]

I've had the same issue. I solved the problem by disabling my firewall. I have no clue why that matters, because it shouldn't. But it does.