I have server with 32GB. Currently it's windows server 2012 R2
It serves as fileserver. 4 Hard Drives with 1 SSD configured with storage pool with hot spare.
To simplify the question, i just want to use the 32GB to serve as cache, to improve the read / write operation. I don't see storage pool / virtual disk has menu to leverage 32GB RAM as cache.
It does not have to be windows server. I am open minded to use linux, freenas.
Any idea ? thanks.
Specifically, to your requirement, I can suggest third-party software like Super Cache Express or Starwind VSAN which will give you a chance to create a virtual drive with RAM cache or/and RAM device on your server.
You could dedicate some of the ram as a ram disk and do some testing and see if it’s worth it. If you make your RAM disk too large, you may prevent Windows from improving the loading times with caching data on your unused RAM. Also you may induce pagefile swapping, severely slowing things down.
If your wanting to rebuild the server I would add a 2nd SSD drive for redudancy and configure the 2 SSD as one volume and use this for your high I/O needs. Then move the cache to the magnetic volumes. After that if you still need more performance you can explore inserting a ram disk into the equation.
