SK Hynix Gold P31 Benchmark and use as a Cache Drive
/We picked up one of these drives at $120 USD and plan to use it as a cache drive for our Unraid server. If this thing performs well enough we will get 3 more and create a RAID 10 cache pool. The SK Hynix P31 would work great for a FreeNAS, TrueNAS, or Unraid cache drive.
Small list of drives we would use for an Unraid Cache
Benchmarks
We are simply using Crystal Disk here then the “real world” benchmarks are further down.
Real World Test
We have a 10Gb network here at the office because we more often than not work with extremely large video files that can be well into the 100 ~200GB range. Sometimes our videos are smaller after compression but the point is, I am copying two files one over the network. One file is about 94GB in size and the other is about 42GBs. I am sending video from a Samsung 960 Pro to the Hynix P31 over the network.
Transfer 1
94GB zip of Fallout 4, sent to the Hynix P31 from a Samsung 960 Pro.
Transfer 2
A 42GB video file sent to the Hynix P31.
Transfer 3
Often our cache can be full and it’s rumored that performance will tank if your NVMe drive is full. Well we filled ours nearly all the way up and nothing changed. So that’s good I guess.
My Use Case
I was pretty happy with the performance of this drive so we are going to move forward and try and pick up 3 more for a RAID 10 cache. We will be using an NVMe adapter to give us 4 M.2 drives in a single 16 Lane PCI-E slot. You can read about this idea here.
