Caching policies are applied to volumes that reside in Flash Pool aggregates. You should understand how caching policies work before changing them.

In most cases, the default caching policy of auto is the best caching policy to use. The caching policy should be changed only if a different policy provides better performance for your workload. Configuring the wrong caching policy can severely degrade volume performance; the performance degradation could increase gradually over time.

Caching policies combine a read caching policy and a write caching policy. The policy name concatenates the names of the read caching policy and the write caching policy, separated by a hyphen. If there is no hyphen in the policy name, the write caching policy is “none”, except for the auto policy.

Read caching policies optimize for future read performance by placing a copy of the data in the cache in addition to the stored data on HDDs. For read caching policies that insert data into the cache for write operations, the cache operates as a write-through cache.

Data inserted into the cache by using the write caching policy exists only in cache; there is no copy in HDDs. Flash Pool cache is RAID protected. Enabling write caching makes data from write operations available for reads from cache immediately, while deferring writing the data to HDDs until it ages out of the cache.

If you move a volume from a Flash Pool aggregate to a single-tier aggregate, it loses its caching policy; if you later move it back to a Flash Pool aggregate, it is assigned the default caching policy of auto. If you move a volume between two Flash Pool aggregates, the caching policy is preserved.