What do the “Cache Policy” values mean ?
Cache Policy’s are how the raid card uses on board RAM to collect data before writing out to disk or to read data before the system asks for it. Write cache is used when we have a lot of data to write and it is faster to write data sequentially to disk instead of writing small chunks. Read cache is used when the system has asked for some data and the raid card keeps the data in cache in case the system asks for the same data again. It is always faster to read and write to cache then to access spinning disks. Understand that you should only use caching if you have good UPS power to the system. If the system looses power and does not flush the cache it is possible to loose data. No one wants that. Lets look at each cache policy LSI raid card use.