Choosing an External SSD for Shade Cache

Choosing an external SSD can help improve your performance with Shade

If you're considering an upgrade or purchasing a new Solid State Drive (SSD) for caching, choosing the right one is crucial for ensuring smooth performance with ShadeFS. Depending on your workload there a few recommended options.

Note: There is not necessarily a need to purchase these hard drives below. A typical Sandisk Extreme or T7 will do just fine and is what most of the Shade team uses on a regular basis. However, if you wish to maximize speed and performance of ShadeFS for caching and heavy workloads, we recommend the items below.

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Why Choosing the Right Cache Drive Matters

Shade intelligently caches the files and bytes that you need as you continue to access data from the cloud in order to optimize workloads and network usage, ensuring a lag-free experience. Unlike NFS and other network file systems, data is streamed from the cloud and cached locally. Shade also supports setting your cache to an external hard drive location.

As a result, the hardware used for cache storage directly impacts performance, making it essential to select a drive that meets workload demands.

Since our caching system involves frequent random reads and writes, Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) are not suitable. Instead, high-speed Solid State Drives (SSDs) significantly enhance performance.

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Recommended Cache Drives for Most Workloads

Most workloads prioritize fast read speeds and burst write speeds, making these SSDs ideal:

1. Samsung 990 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD 4TB - Available in 4TB, 2TB, or 1TB

2. WD Black SN850X NVMe SSD 2TB - Great for gaming and high-performance workloads

3. Crucial T700 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD 2TB - Ultra-fast Gen5 speeds, ideal for future-proofing

4. Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB NVMe SSD - High-capacity and reliable performance

5. Acasis 40Gbps M.2 NVMe SSD Enclosure - Ensures maximum external connectivity speeds

In all cases, opting for a larger cache drive is recommended. Choose the highest capacity possible for better performance as this allows you to cache more files and thus reduce the round trips required to go to the cloud.

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Recommended Cache Drives for Sustained Write Workloads

For workloads that require consistent high-speed writes (such as video rendering and large data transfers), these SSDs are best:

Recommended 1TB Drives:

1. Samsung 970 PRO NVMe M.2 SSD 1TB - Optimized for sustained write speeds

2. WD Red SN700 NVMe SSD 1TB - Designed for NAS and continuous workloads

Recommended 2TB Drives:

1. Tropic Colour 2TB Space Shuttle SSD - Portable and optimized for creative professionals

2. Seagate FireCuda 530 NVMe SSD 2TB - High endurance and exceptional write speeds

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Understanding Sustained Write Workloads

A sustained write workload involves continuous data writes exceeding 1 GBps (8Gbps) without idle time. If this describes your workflow, selecting an SSD designed for sustained write speeds is crucial.

Examples of Sustained Write Workloads:

• Copying 100GB+ of assets from a camera card to a Shade Drive

  • Faster sustained write speeds reduce copying time since speed is limited by how fast data is written.

• Rendering large video assets where the output exceeds 1 GBps (8Gbps)

  • High write speeds prevent bottlenecks during rendering.

If your workload has idle moments during the writing process, it does not classify as a "sustained write" workload. In such cases, a high-performance SSD with excellent burst speeds is more beneficial.