Any reason why you can’t buy a 2TB SSD and have both a 1TB and 2TB? I have another comment on this thread outlining the complexities of caching on Linux.

L2ARC is not a read cache in the conventional sense, but something closer to swap for disks only. It is only effective if your ARC hit rate is really low from memory constraints, although I’m not sure how things stack up now with persistent L2ARC. ZFS does have special allocation devices, though, where metadata and optionally small blocks of data (which HDDs struggle with) can go, but you can lose data if these devices fail. There’s also the SLOG, where sync writes can go. It’s often useful to use something like optane drives for it.

Personally, I’d just keep separate drives. A lot of caching methods are afterthoughts (bcache is not really maintained as Kent is now working on bcachefs) or, like ZFS, are really complex are not true readback/writeback caches. In particular, LVM cache can, depending on its configuration, lead to data loss if a cache device is lost, and LVM itself can occur some overhead.

Flash is cheap. A 2TB NVMe drive is now roughly the cost of 2 AAA games (which is sad, really). OP should just buy a new drive.

Not all docker containers contain a shell binary.. You can still propose an issue to moby, the upstream of docker, though.

Yes, probably. It is possible to flash and use dasharo (a downstream fork of coreboot) onto a modern MSI Z790A motherboard, which gets you pcie gen 5, 14th gen intel, and so on. I’m not sure if the necessary code to get it running has been upstreamed into coreboot yet. https://docs.dasharo.com/unified/msi/overview/

From there, you can use corna’s me_cleaner to disable (and clean) the management engine. There are reports of it working on alder lake: https://docs.dasharo.com/unified/msi/overview/

Here’s a full tutorial on disabling your ME on modern systems: https://github.com/mostav02/Remove_IntelME_FPT?tab=readme-ov-file#neutralizing-me-and-flashing-via-fpt

To be honest, though, I wouldn’t bother unless you’re doing it for fun. I’m not sure if this entire process necessarily works on the Z790+14th gen intel anyway.