Improve slow cold start of HDD with some sort of cache?

Hi together,
My problem: I've got an HDD (two in a mdadm-RAID1 in fact) that goes to "deep sleep" after not being accessed for a while which I find wonderful. It does not make any sounds anymore and certainly saves energy.
BUT: An access to this HDD is followed by a freezing/loading of the file explorers of about 8 seconds in which the HDD starts up. Of course while the HDD is started up the access speed is fine.
Now what I would love is to have a portion of my RAM or SSD (about 1GB) act as a write cache and as a read cache only for the index. I only want to have to wait for the startup time if I actually read file data or write more than the cache can fit.
Priority one is to have the full file index cached; priority two is to have that write cache. A read cache is not necessary because to me being able to quickly find and select data to copy is the important part. After initiating the copy / read access I can just do something else.
I could not find anything that specific but I have to admit I don't know what exactly to search for. I tried "cold start hdd cache" and similar queries but to no avail. I do not really have much experience with caching. But after many years with these HDDs it still does grind my gears a bit each time I have to wait for the startup...
Note: I have noted that many times the most recent accessed directory listings seem to be cached in that the HDD keeps being turned off while I re-list some directories. Only when accessing previously unlisted directories the HDD begins to start up. I assume this is some sort of default linux cache? Or even a cache inside my HDDs?
I am using Arch linux and the HDD-RAID is connected via USB 3.0 if that matters.
Answers
-
I just thought that having the SSD as the "persistent" cache would be better since I would not need to build up the cache after every system boot. But restarts are quite rare (the host is a home server) so it would not be a no-go to use the RAM.
0 -
Have you asked Arch Linux Forums? https://bbs.archlinux.org/
0 -
No I did not. I thought that this is more of a general linux problem.
Do you think this question would be more fitting there?
0
Categories
- 9.7K All Categories
- 19 LFX Mentorship
- 72 LFX Mentorship: Linux Kernel
- 437 Linux Foundation Boot Camps
- 259 Cloud Engineer Boot Camp
- 88 Advanced Cloud Engineer Boot Camp
- 39 DevOps Engineer Boot Camp
- 18 Cloud Native Developer Boot Camp
- 1.4K Training Courses
- 17 LFC110 Class Forum
- 3 LFC131 Class Forum
- 18 LFD102 Class Forum
- 112 LFD103 Class Forum
- 8 LFD121 Class Forum
- 59 LFD201 Class Forum
- 1 LFD213 Class Forum - Discontinued
- 128 LFD232 Class Forum
- 23 LFD254 Class Forum
- 526 LFD259 Class Forum
- 99 LFD272 Class Forum
- 1 LFD272-JP クラス フォーラム
- 1 LFS145 Class Forum
- 18 LFS200 Class Forum
- 735 LFS201 Class Forum
- 1 LFS201-JP クラス フォーラム
- LFS203 Class Forum
- 23 LFS207 Class Forum
- 291 LFS211 Class Forum
- 53 LFS216 Class Forum
- 41 LFS241 Class Forum
- 33 LFS242 Class Forum
- 31 LFS243 Class Forum
- 9 LFS244 Class Forum
- 27 LFS250 Class Forum
- 1 LFS250-JP クラス フォーラム
- 121 LFS253 Class Forum
- 915 LFS258 Class Forum
- 10 LFS258-JP クラス フォーラム
- 77 LFS260 Class Forum
- 122 LFS261 Class Forum
- 26 LFS262 Class Forum
- 77 LFS263 Class Forum
- 15 LFS264 Class Forum
- 10 LFS266 Class Forum
- 13 LFS267 Class Forum
- 16 LFS268 Class Forum
- 13 LFS269 Class Forum
- 190 LFS272 Class Forum
- 1 LFS272-JP クラス フォーラム
- 201 LFW211 Class Forum
- 147 LFW212 Class Forum
- 887 Hardware
- 210 Drivers
- 74 I/O Devices
- 44 Monitors
- 115 Multimedia
- 206 Networking
- 98 Printers & Scanners
- 85 Storage
- 744 Linux Distributions
- 88 Debian
- 64 Fedora
- 12 Linux Mint
- 13 Mageia
- 24 openSUSE
- 132 Red Hat Enterprise
- 33 Slackware
- 13 SUSE Enterprise
- 353 Ubuntu
- 465 Linux System Administration
- 37 Cloud Computing
- 65 Command Line/Scripting
- Github systems admin projects
- 94 Linux Security
- 77 Network Management
- 107 System Management
- 47 Web Management
- 59 Mobile Computing
- 21 Android
- 24 Development
- 1.2K New to Linux
- 1.1K Getting Started with Linux
- 523 Off Topic
- 126 Introductions
- 210 Small Talk
- 19 Study Material
- 779 Programming and Development
- 254 Kernel Development
- 491 Software Development
- 918 Software
- 255 Applications
- 181 Command Line
- 2 Compiling/Installing
- 75 Games
- 316 Installation
- 43 All In Program
- 43 All In Forum
Upcoming Training
-
August 20, 2018
Kubernetes Administration (LFS458)
-
August 20, 2018
Linux System Administration (LFS301)
-
August 27, 2018
Open Source Virtualization (LFS462)
-
August 27, 2018
Linux Kernel Debugging and Security (LFD440)