After upgrading my internet connection I immediatelly noticed that my HDD tops 40 MB/s and bottlnecking download speed in qbittorrent. Is it possible to use SSD drive as a catch drive for 12 TB HDD so it uses SSD speeds when downloading and moves files to HDD later on? If yes, does it make sense? Anyone using anything simmilar? Would 512 GB be enough or could I benefit from 2TB SSD?

HDD is just for jellyfin (movies/shows), not in raid, dont need backup for that drive, I can afford risking data if that matters at all

All suggestions are welcome, Thx in advance

EDIT: I obviously have upset some of you, wasn’t my intention, I’m sorry about that. I love to tinker and learn new things, but I could live with much lower speeds tho… Please don’t hate me if I couldn’t understand your comment or not being clear with my question.

HDD being bottleneck at 40 MB/s was wrong assumption (found out in meantime). I’m still trying to figure out what was the reason for download to be that slow, but I’m interested in learning about the main question anyway. I just thought I’m experiencing the same issue like many people today, having faster internet than storage. Some of you provided solutions I will look into, but need time for that and also have to fix whatever else I’m having issue with.

Keep this community awesome because it is <3

  • capitalEnglish
    5•4 months ago

    I do this with mergerfs.

    I then periodically use their prewritten scripts to move things off the cache and to the backing drives.

    I should say it’s not really caching but effectively works to take care of this issue. Bonus since all that storage isn’t just used for cache but also long term storage. For me, that’s a better value proposition.

      • @[email protected]English
        5•4 months ago

        <3 mergerfs and <3 my setup, but just a warning: make sure you read the documentation and ensure you’ve got all the proper options set in your fstab entry for the mergerfs mount.

        There’s a lot of stuff in there that can interact weirdly with various pieces of software and lead to the most insane debug sessions because, well, why would a drive mount break other software (in my case it was qbittorrent in docker when an upgrade required me to change the mount options to not include direct_io).

        • capitalEnglish
          2•4 months ago

          Yeah that was fun times.

          Luckily, thanks to using docker, it was easy enough to “pin” a working version in the compose file while I figured out what just broke.

          For everyone’s reference, here’s my fstab to give you an idea of what works with linuxserver.io’s qbittorrent

          ## Media disks setup for mergerfs and snapraid

# Map cache to 1TB SSD
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Samsung_SSD_860_EVO_1TB_S3Z8NB0K820469N-part1 /mnt/ssd1 xfs defaults 0 0

# Map storage and parity. All spinning disks.
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD100EZAZ-11TDBA0_JEK39X4N-part1 /mnt/par1         xfs defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD100EZAZ-11TDBA0_JEK3TY5N-part1 /mnt/disk01       xfs defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD100EZAZ-11TDBA0_JEK4806N-part1 /mnt/disk02       xfs defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD100EZAZ-11TDBA0_JEK4H0RN-part1 /mnt/disk03       xfs defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD30EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WCC4N4XFT0TS-part1 /mnt/disk04 xfs defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD30EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WCC4N4XFT1YS-part1 /mnt/disk05 xfs defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD30EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WCC4N4XFT3EK-part1 /mnt/disk06 xfs defaults 0 0
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-WDC_WD30EFRX-68EUZN0_WD-WCC4N6CKJJ6P-part1 /mnt/disk07 xfs defaults 0 0

# Setup mergerfs backing pool
/mnt/disk* /mnt/stor fuse.mergerfs defaults,nonempty,allow_other,use_ino,inodecalc=path-hash,cache.files=off,moveonenospc=true,dropcacheonclose=true,link_cow=true,minfreespace=1000G,category.create=pfrd,fsname=mergerfs 0 0

# Setup mgergerfs caching pool
/mnt/ssd1:/mnt/disk* /mnt/cstor fuse.mergerfs defaults,nonempty,allow_other,use_ino,inodecalc=path-hash,cache.files=partial,moveonenospc=ff,dropcacheonclose=true,minfreespace=10G,category.create=ff,fsname=cachemergerfs 0 0
          • @[email protected]English
            2•4 months ago

            Yeah, it took me FOREVER to finally land on a useful search result for WTF was going on (thanks Google, you pile of junk!) because the impact was that everything looked perfectly fine, you just… couldn’t download anything?

            No errors, no faults, nothing in the logs, just adding anything resulted in absolutely nothing happening.

            Really freaking weird.