Add cachecade SSD to an existing virtual drive in AVAGO MegaRAID with storcli64

Increase the IO performance of big storage consisting of hard drives with the CacheCade feature with MegaRAID hardware controllers. Here are the commands to ensure adding an SSD to cache storage of hard drives and the whole output:

storcli64 /c0 add VD cachecade r0 drives=252:0 WB
storcli64 /c0/v0 set ssdcaching=on

Summary and explanation

  • The controller used is AVAGO MegaRAID SAS9361-4i
  • Three 12T hard drives and 1 SSD 1T.
  • RAID5 of 3 hard drive. The name of the virtual drive is v0.
  • The CacheCade is in RAID0. The name of the virtual drive is v1.
  • The CacheCade is in WriteBack mode. The WriteBack mode is dangerous when the CacheCade device is RAID0, because there is no redundancy, but it’s OK if the purpose of the machine is just a proxy cache. WriteBack mode leads to much more performance to gain from the cache device over slow device sotrage, but should be carefully planned when using RAID0 cache (or single) device.
  • Using storcli – the cli command line tool to manage a (LSI) MegaRAID.
  • Add CacheCade RAID0 device by the first command. It will create a virtual drive RAID0 with the name v1.
  • Ensure the caching is enabled for the virtual device it should be by explicitly setting it with the second command. Adding only a CacheCade device may not add the cache virtual device to the existing virtual devices!

Output of a real world example

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